


Snapshots

by vinnie2757



Series: Gorillaz in a Happy Mood [1]
Category: Gorillaz
Genre: Gen, Phase 1, Phase 2, all of my headcanons are trash and i dont care i love them anyway, bc lighthearted stuff is nice, theres probably going to be a few darker ones in here but im going to try and keep them lighthearted, they came so close to being a real family unit, they tried so hard and got so far but in the end murdoc needs to be punched in the mouth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-13 16:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 66,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3388463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The early years are full of the soft moments, the easy smiles and piggybacks, the laughter and the supportive hands behind backs. </p><p>[A collection of moments from a time when Gorillaz were happy.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Octopus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle is focused on her drawing, and Murdoc wants one of his own.

It’s around one-ish, early in the afternoon but after Russel’s cleared up from lunch, that Murdoc comes stumbling in. He looks exhausted, and has bites all down his neck and chest, his jeans more crumpled than normal. Russel tells him to put a shirt on, but, as ever, he is ignored. Murdoc clutches his skull and with a groan, flops to the floor next to Noodle. She’s sat by the coffee table, all of the song notes and lyric magnets shoved out of the way to make room for a pile of stationary, and she’s furiously scribbling away at a piece of paper with a red felt-tip.

She has her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and her hand and arm has red and black and green pen streaked across it. It’s rather endearing, actually. She feels him looking at her, and beams at him, shoves the picture in his direction.

It takes his eyes a moment to focus, but he blinks away the swirling monsters at the corners, and looks at the octopus she’s drawn on the page.

‘Huh,’ he says, and tilts his head a little, squints at the tentacles with each sucker drawn individually. ‘That’s real good, love.’

She peeks over the top of the page at hearing his voice, and he grins at her, gives her a thumbs up. Laughing that monstrous little laugh of hers, she puts the paper back down and begins drawing over the lines with a black marker pen.

For a moment or so, Murdoc watches her, scratches at the itching skin of his arm where the ink didn’t stick on the retouch to his cross, and then he thumps his forearm down on the table next to her. Startled, she looks at him.

He gestures at the octopus, and then makes scribbling motions on his arm.

It takes her a moment, but she moves the paper to sit over his arm like a stencil or a transfer, and he nods.

‘Yeah,’ he says, gives her another thumbs-up.

Face alight, she turns and pulls his arm towards her. It takes her an hour or so, and Russel laughs, impressed that Murdoc has the patience to sit there for that long to let a child draw on him.

Murdoc sniffs imperiously. ‘It takes much longer when you have a proper one,’ he says, and puts his nose in the air.

Russel, sure Noodle cannot see him from where he’s sat on the couch, sticks his middle finger up. Murdoc, with his arm at Noodle’s mercy, and Russel’s shit-eating grin telling him he’ll get a smack in the mouth if he returns the gesture, settles for sticking his tongue out.

Another half-hour passes, and then Noodle is capping her pen with a loud cry and clapping her hands. The pen-tattoo, then, is done.

Murdoc examines it in interest, twisting his arm this way and that, admiring the way the tentacles coil around his wrist.

‘This is fantastic!’ he says, and gives his girl a big grin. She beams back, and somehow she’s got pen on her face too.

He’s showing Russel when 2D comes in, the drummer actually interested in Noodle’s skin-penmanship, and with a gabbled sentence, the girl is tugging 2D over to look too.

‘What is it?’ the boy laughs, and then winces, rubs his eye. A migraine, then.

‘She gave me a tattoo,’ Murdoc says, proud as anything, and shoves his arm in 2D’s face for him to look at. ‘It looks fucking great, eh?’

2D looks a little uncomfortable, but Murdoc has no idea why, and doesn’t particularly care. The tattoo looks great, and he scratches his head before making a valiant, but ultimately futile, attempt to ask Noodle if he can have the picture.

She stares blankly at him, and then pokes at the tattoo.

‘It isn’t permanent, love,’ he tries, slow and steady. ‘I’ll need the picture to give the artist.’

Russel rolls his eyes. ‘Just photocopy it. There’s a copier down in the office. I got it working the other day.’

Murdoc considers this, and after Noodle’s gone to bed, he runs several copies of the paper and his arm both into the machine.

A week or so later, he comes home with a strip of gauze taped to his arm, and Noodle looks at him in concern. She turns his arm, frowning at it. Murdoc grins down at her, and reaches to peel the gauze away. The tattoo’ll be fine now, it’s just because it was raining on his way out, was all. No sense in ruining it before it’s even begun.

She sees the first bit of thick black and blood-red, and starts screaming and jumping. Like a child at Christmas – and Murdoc knows children at Christmas, has played Santa enough times to know how they are – she hurriedly pulls the rest of the gauze off, taking some of his arm hair with it when she yanks the tape away.

Squealing, she holds his hand and bounces up at down, almost pulling his arm out of its socket in her enthusiasm.

When Russel comes hurrying in, worried about what all the noise is for, he sees the newest tattoo on Murdoc’s arm and laughs.

Murdoc bends to pick the girl up, and she all but wipes her nose on the tattoo, her face is that close. She dots her fingers along the suckers, coils her fingers along the lines of the tentacles, presses hard enough to bruise in the black sockets where eyes should be. Murdoc thinks, idly, that he should have stuck a pair of googly eyes on there, that would have really got her going.

Instead, he just laughs, and lets her admire her design imprinted permanently on his skin.

For weeks, he wears his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, or rolled up when he can be arsed to wear a button-up shirt as opposed to a T-shirt, and the paparazzi are quick to notice the fresh ink on his arm. When the pictures get sent to the press, as they always do, everyone gossips about the meaning behind the octopus. The inverted cross is par for the course with a man who wears one about his neck and curses Satan’s name instead of God’s. But the octopus is a befuddling thing.

When interviewers have the sense to ask about it, he’s eager to show it off, proudly proclaiming that his girl designed it, often ruffling Noodle’s hair or giving her a beaming grin whenever she realises they’re talking about her tattoo. The fans go wild, as fans are wont to do, and nobody is in the least surprised when 2D gets a tattoo too. His is subtler, of course, because 2D is a skittish, easily-frightened kind of fellow, and it had taken at least four pints before he was even amiable to the idea, never mind actually go through with it.

(Murdoc takes full credit, because it’s another of Noodle’s designs, a smaller one, but it’s hers, and he’s the reason it’s a thing at all, and that deserves credit.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -It’s like a series of G-Bites, get it? Ha, I’m a loser.  
> \- I think out of all of them, the octopus is my favourite tattoo.  
> \- According to Rise of the Ogre, Murdoc’s method of songwriting is writing a bunch of phrases on magnets and giving them to 2D to throw at the fridge, and whatever stuck got turned into a song. It makes a lot of sense, actually.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	2. Every Satellite up here is Watching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2D is shaken by a nightmare of pink and black and the possibility of Murdoc dying.

By default, Murdoc is never found in the Kong building between the hours of nine pm and noon. It’s just impossible. But sometimes, there is an exception, and he skulks around the kitchen or the recording studio looking for rum and/or his cigarettes. Even rarer, he’ll sit and watch a movie in the cinema, or play a game in the den. Rarer still, a blue-moon horizon sending dust pirouetting through the gaps in the blinds, he’ll sleep in the building, in the room he still hasn’t decorated because what would be the point? He’s mostly in his camper, and that’s fine with the rest of the band. At least they know where he is.

It’s raining hard, a thunderstorm sparking too close for comfort, and 2D has a nightmare. He has nightmares a lot, places he’s never been to under attack from enemies he didn’t know existed, a fight in a war he doesn’t understand. Tonight, he dreamt of black cloaks and pink walls, blasted gold by sand and sea and sun. For a moment, in pyjama bottoms that are too short on the leg by at least two inches, and a zip-through he hasn’t worn for months, he lingers, bare-foot and sticky-faced, in the foyer, debating what to do.

Then he glances up, at the camera. There are people watching. People will know if he leaves the building, they’ll tell him. They tell him everything. It’s quite scary.

They’ll know if he goes down to the car park to check on Murdoc. He doesn’t _need_ to check on him, not really. It’s just a dream. And people have been reading into what they do. It’s like that _Big Brother_ show they’re doing now, all those people in a house, on TV 24-7. It sounds horrible. Naturally, Murdoc wants to do the celebrity version, even though they aren’t real celebrities yet.

(Murdoc will say that real celebrities don’t do _Big Brother,_ just ones with dead careers and then he will pause. Think on this. And throw the nearest heavy object at him. 2D will not question this, because he _did_ bring it up, after all.)

So instead of going to the car park, he plucks at a stray thread in his sleeve, and pads back to the cinema, deciding to watch a film instead.

He’s thinking about putting _Dawn of the Dead_ on, because that always takes his mind off things, but when he enters, there’s already a film playing. Something with loud guns and explosions and lots of fire and swearing. Startled, he pauses in the doorway, and light spills in, bleaching the screen.

‘Oh, for fuck sake,’ Murdoc huffs from somewhere in the middle, and throws a crushed can of Strongbow over his shoulder. It falls short by several feet. 2D flinches anyway. ‘Shut the fucking door if you’re coming in.’

‘Sorry,’ 2D replies, and shuts the door.

Murdoc grunts, and the popping sizzle of a fresh can being opened echoes too-loud through the theatre.

Picking his way over spilt popcorn, suspicious stains and stubbed-out cigarette butts, he finds Murdoc in the middle row, feet up on the back of the chair one in front and one to the left of where he sits. Carefully, 2D pulls the seat to his right down and sits in it, as prim and proper as he can. His gaze flutters to the camera in the corner, and he sinks in the seat, draws his knees up.

Murdoc, still annoyed at the boy’s interruption, follows his eyes.

‘Sprayed paint on it,’ he says, and licks the corner of his mouth, grinning. ‘They can’t see shit. Might spray all the cameras. Fucking creeps. Who’s idea was it? They’re a fucking idiot.’

‘Noodle’s,’ 2D mumbles into his knees.

Murdoc pauses. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Right. Well, then. I guess. Okay. Hm. Whatever. What you ‘ere for? Thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I was,’ 2D mumbles, and picks at his toenails. ‘Woke up. Couldn’t sleep.’

Murdoc side-eyes him. ‘Want to talk about it?’

He only offers the chance because otherwise it’ll fester and 2D will be reduced to a nail-biting, gibbering wreck until he’s garbled his way through the experience with someone, and that can take days. They don’t have days. Not really.

(They have the rest of their lives, but Murdoc is not willing to wait that long.)

‘There was a beach,’ 2D mumbles, and thanks Murdoc for the cigarette passed his way, breathing deep when it’s lit. ‘It was. There was a lot of pink, I don’t know, I don’t remember the exact details. Just pink. Like some bird’s place, y’know? Like when you’re a teen and it’s all boybands and unicorns and girly shit.’

Murdoc does know.

‘So there was this beach, and it was like. I was stuck underground? No, no, it was an island or something? I could see the sea from the window. I was underwater in this base thing. And it was – it was under attack, yeah? Like, there were planes and shit. People were there, fighting. I think they were trying to save it? Maybe just stay alive? I was stuck in the underwater place, I couldn’t leave. I tried the door, I did! But there was just. There was no way out. I was locked in.’

Murdoc thinks he’d probably lock 2D in his underwater room too, because if there was any danger, letting the stupid bastard run riot would only let him get himself killed.

‘But it was – I think – you were there. I think – I could – I knew. You were there, I’m sure of it.’

At this, they look at each other, 2D terrified, Murdoc sharp. A moment passes of breathless silence, the rapid clack-clack-clack of gunfire from the guns in the movie ricocheting around them.

2D winces, tries to hide behind his knees.

‘They were trying to kill you, I think. I think that’s what they were there for. There was a scary man, after you. He was. He was looking for you.’

‘Me?’

‘Mm.’

2D falls silent, and Murdoc watches him.

‘You dream about me dying a lot,’ he says, quiet, and stubs his cigarette out on the back of the chair in front.

‘You saved my life,’ 2D replies.

‘I really didn’t.’

But 2D shrugs and lets it go.

They fall back into silence.

‘I won’t die,’ Murdoc promises him. ‘I had measles when I was seven. Survived that, no thanks to daddy dearest, of course. But I won’t die.’

2D looks at him, unconvinced. He remembers the howling and the tantrums and the pathetic, baby-like whining when Murdoc got thirty years worth of vaccinations, and how he proclaimed, constantly, that he was going to die. Russel and Noodle – the latter of which didn’t understand a word – found it all hilarious, but 2D had been genuinely worried for Murdoc’s welfare.

Curling his lip, apparently aware of this memory, Murdoc lifts a hand, little finger extended. The red polish there is beginning to chip, 2D notices. Noodle makes them pinky-promise all the time, and 2D recognises the gesture. His finger is longer than Murdoc’s, thinner and paler and more fragile. Murdoc is almost afraid to squeeze in case he snaps it off.

But 2D’s finger curls strong and determined, wanting very much the security of a child’s promise, and Murdoc gives him that, because there’s little else to give him. The boy grins at him, and Murdoc smiles back, crooked and a little morose, almost. 2D doesn’t seem to notice in the least.

They sit in silence for the rest of the film. Murdoc’s hand rests on the armrest between them, but 2D doesn’t grab his arm, even though his fingers are itching. The action in the film is too like his dream, Murdoc thinks, and when it’s over, he climbs over the chairs to go and change the film, without a word putting that godawful zombie flick 2D likes so much on, returning with another six-pack.

‘Thanks,’ 2D says.

He falls asleep halfway through, can of Strongbow half-drunk. Murdoc takes great delight in balancing it on his head and waiting for it to topple. It does, straight into 2D’s lap, making him yelp and leap to his feet, bottom half soaked and stinking of cider.

‘Murdoc!’ he cries. Whines, really. He plucks at the bottoms, which are clinging entirely too close for being directly in Murdoc’s eye-line. His eyes go to the camera again.

Murdoc laughs until he’s hacking, a true smoker’s cough. It sounds awful. 2D thinks about hitting him with the can, but this is the least damaging thing to have happened thus far, and he decides not to ruin it. Positive reinforcement, right? Good thing happens, good reward. Making him look like he pissed himself is worth a laugh, and that’s better than a punch in the mouth.

Or, you know, having a Vauxhall Astra driven straight into your face.

So grumbling over-exaggeratedly all the way, 2D stomps back to his room, knowing full well the cameras will clock his leaving the cinema with wet pyjama bottoms, and the fans will go wild, because they’ll surely know Murdoc is in there. Some of them have _theories_ about what they get up to in the few dark corners, hidden from camera view.

The thought of it makes 2D itch.

He showers and changes into clean pyjamas, collapsing into bed and for a half-hour or so, he lies there stares at the ceiling. Eventually, he drifts, and dreams of a smaller house with thin walls and loud laughter. A house that was home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Have you guessed which ship I sail yet?  
> \- As usual, title is from a song; this time it’s Cloud of Unknowing [Plastic Beach]  
> \- Big Brother first aired in the UK in 2000, so having Stu watch it in hospital is a no-go, boo.  
> \- According to Rise of the Ogre, Murdoc drank Strongbow Cider pre-D-day. At least it wasn’t Stella, I guess.  
> \- Seriously though, those cameras are a hella bad idea.  
> \- This ties into Sleepover, which I won’t re-post into this, I just linked it, it’s so much easier than all that hassle LOL.  
> \- Is he dreaming of Wobble Street, because I think he’s dreaming of Wobble Street.  
> -Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	3. The Bitter Pill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2D’s migraines are getting to be unmanageable, but Russel has an idea. [Phase 2]

Noodle is upstairs, making sure 2D has everything he needs; medication, water, blackout blinds firmly fastened flat against the window, the works. Practice had been cut short, 2D getting twitchier and twitchier, fingers rubbing at the skin beneath one eyebrow, pressing the flat of his hand against his eye itself. They’d carried on, hoping to get through the set before the migraine took hold, but before they’d finished practicing _All Alone_ , 2D had sunk to his knees, hands tight over his ears.

Russel had carried him to his bed, and left Noodle in charge of him. She was the one capable of being quiet, and gentle, and sweet, after all. 2D liked her taking care of him the best, so they let her, retreating downstairs where his sensitive ears wouldn’t hear them.

Murdoc is rooting in the fridge – an enormous thing that he is almost positive they don’t actually need, but hey they get to keep their alcohol in there – and Russel is whisking eggs to make omelettes. He knows Murdoc won’t eat, because the man _never_ eats, but they’ve been working hard, and Noodle is a growing girl.

That, and he’s hungry. He can be excused; ghosts take a lot out of you. Not that he has any now, but the principle stands.

‘We need to do something about this shit,’ Murdoc is saying, and straightens with a triumphant “aha,” two bottles in one hand and the bunch of spring onions Russel had been after in the other. ‘It’s getting ridiculous. I thought being away from the band’d be – well, not good, I didn’t want it to be good. But you know what I mean. I thought it’d have sorted that shit out.’

Russel hums, takes the onions and runs them under the tap, making sure they’re clean before dicing them with the sort of efficiency that makes Murdoc flinch.

‘I think,’ he starts, and then pauses, looks at a chunk of onion before throwing it into the bag with the eggshells and onion-ends. ‘I think it’s just one of those things, you know? He’s gone from relative inactivity, especially regarding music, to being back at the deep end. Listening to music in your bedroom isn’t the same as being in the same room as a live band. And he has to remember lyrics and notes and timings and a lot of stuff we don’t have to.’

Murdoc opens his mouth, but snaps it shut when Russel continues.

‘And I mean, he’s been through a lot, you know? I went with him to one of his clinic appointments, back before we moved out to L.A. They were saying that he’s going to have it rough for the rest of his life. Brain damage isn’t just something that goes away.’

There’s silence for a moment, and then Murdoc grunts, slams through the drawers looking for a bottle opener.

‘Not my fault,’ he huffs, and eventually unearths one from under several packs of straws and cocktail sticks. ‘He happened to be in the way, was all. His mum said he was a bit thick anyway.’

Russel gives him a despairing look. He’s long since deemed Murdoc a lost cause in accepting his part in 2D’s “accident.”

‘That wasn’t the point,’ Russel tells him, and thanks him for the beer shoved his way. ‘What I’m saying is that he’s got serious damage in his brain, right? He’ll be on meds the rest of his life. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t keep on top of it, but there’s not a lot we can do about that. Unless we keep on top of it for him, I guess.’

Murdoc pauses, bottle raised to his lips, and frowns over at his drummer.

‘What?’ he says, lowers the bottle, because Russel is looking at him.

‘Going to the doctors to get repeat prescriptions is a hassle,’ Russel says, slow, as if coaxing a child. ‘They have to keep examining him, and they find the same thing over and over again. It would help a lot if we could circumvent that.’

Murdoc keeps frowning, but the cogs begin to turn, creaking and groaning under the pressure of a coherent idea.

‘Are you,’ he starts, and then stops, frowns into the bottle. ‘I mean, I _can_. But. Why would I?’

‘We’re losing whole days here,’ Russel says after a moment, deciding that appealing to Murdoc’s burgeoning sense of lost time is a better approach than the dead end that is his compassion. ‘Because of these migraines. If he had better, more regular access to his painkillers, it’d be easier on all of us. We could get the album done in no time.’

Murdoc sits down at the table to consider this, and Russel turns his attention to the omelettes. They’re done just in time for Noodle to appear in the kitchen, looking as worried as ever.

‘I think it’s going to be a long one,’ she says, and smiles at Russel as he puts an omelette in front of her.

‘Yeah?’ he asks, and dumps one in front of Murdoc too, who looks at it apathetically.

She nods, pokes her fork into the egg to fish out a coil of onion. ‘It’s pretty bad. I think it’s been building for a while.’

Murdoc is still considering it.

‘If I wrote his prescription,’ he says eventually, and Noodle chokes on a mouthful of omelette. ‘I mean. We’re cutting out the middleman, right? All we need is mine and his signatures on the forms, and then we’re golden. Anyone can pick it up.’ He glances at Noodle. ‘’Cept you, love. But any of us three could, Russ.’

Russel nods, relieved that Murdoc seems amiable to the idea.

‘Yeah,’ he agrees. ‘And you could write them more regularly. I mean, we know 2D well enough to know when something’s wrong. And we’ll still get him to book in for a normal consultation. But we wouldn’t have to worry about making the pills stretch, right?’

‘I’ll just write a new one any time he gets low,’ Murdoc agrees.

Noodle is frowning at them. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’ she asks.

‘Licensed doctor,’ Murdoc reminds her. ‘It’s not a big fancy degree, like. But I can do prescriptions. I keep forgetting, to be honest.’

Whilst they finish off their lunch – Murdoc utterly ignoring his, and pushing it towards Noodle when she reaches with her fork – Murdoc chews at his nails, staring off towards the doorway.

‘I – that’s the right thing to do, right?’ he asks, as Russel and Noodle do the washing up; Russ at the sink, elbow-deep in suds, Noodle on a stool next to him, tea towel in hand. ‘Do his prescriptions.’

‘It’s a start,’ Russel agrees.

 Murdoc continues chewing his nails and staring at the door. After they’re done with tidying up, Russel and Noodle leave him there to consider this some more. It shouldn’t take all this thinking, Russel thinks; a decent human being would have had the idea themselves. But Murdoc is a special case, and he needs reminding to not be a sack of shit.

It takes a few days before 2D feels up to leaving his room. Noodle has been taking him light meals, soup and sandwiches and sneaking him chocolate, and it’s helped.

Murdoc is waiting for him the moment he comes stumbling into the kitchen to get a cup of tea.

‘I need your signature,’ he says, and shoves a piece of paper and a pen over to where 2D is standing deer-stiff.

‘Wot?’

‘Just sign the form, paper-brain,’ the older man sniffs. He looks offended by being questioned, but he always does.

2D blinks at it; he recognises the green of the slip, and muscle-memory takes his hand to the dotted line for the patient’s signature.

‘There,’ he says, dropping the pen and stumbling past. ‘What you get?’

‘The usual,’ Murdoc says, ‘a bigger supply, though. It should last you until your consultation next month.’

2D glugs the water and blinks stupidly at him. Murdoc waits.

‘How’d you manage that, then?’

The bassist grins and shoves the prescription in 2D’s face. There, in the box for the one prescribing the drugs, it reads Dr M. F. Niccals.

2D had totally forgotten about that, and tells Murdoc this.

‘I know,’ he replies, sniffing, looking mightily pleased with himself. ‘But aren’t I clever, eh? Getting you more of your meds? Eh?’

2D agrees that he is very clever, but bites down on a question as to why he’s doing it at all.

You don’t ask Murdoc why he does anything positive if you want him to continue doing it, else he’ll stop and start doing the opposite, just to be a prick.

‘I’m gonna,’ he starts, and Murdoc nods, shoving to his feet.

‘I need to go hand this in anyway. Want more fags while I’m out?’

2D considers it. ‘Yeah,’ he says with a nod that makes his eye twitch. ‘Thanks.’

Murdoc lopes off, whistling to himself. He’ll be proud for days, and 2D thinks that’s probably better than him being a miserable sod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- As always, title from a song; To Binge [Plastic Beach]  
> \- My family has a history of migraine, and it’s fucking awful. My grandma (this was back in the 60’s though) had to have counter-signed medication because it fucked with the blood pressure in your brain. Mum doesn’t remember what it was she had, though. I imagine 2D would have it, whatever it was.  
> \- As of phase 2, Murdoc is officially a licensed doctor, which is pretty terrifying. He can legally experiment on monkeys. Open University is an incredible place, I guess. Niccals, M.D. Christ.  
> \- Cheese and onion omelettes are a glorious thing, tbh.  
> \- These notes are all ridiculous and have no interesting facts in them, I'm sorry.  
> \- It’s 2015 I don’t want to play the “review and I’ll continue” card, but I totally will because I have no idea if anyone’s really enjoying it and I don’t want to waste my time writing something no one enjoys hahaha. I know like 18 people are but hey-oh. I am playing that card.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	4. [Dick Joke]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle is not as tall as she thinks she is, and misses her family too easily. [Phase 1]

Noodle has not seen 2D for a few days; Murdoc, picking at scabs on his knuckles, looking like an overgrown schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike shed, tells her that whilst she and Russel were out doing the weekly shop (bi-weekly, now, because they’ve worked out their routines, what they need, and Russel is fond of making her Japanese recipes he finds online that spark absolutely no memories, much to his disappointment), 2D developed a migraine.

She knows full well that Murdoc is lying to her, but she can’t think of that exact word to call him what they both know he is. So she kicks him in the shin and runs away to sit in the den and ignore his attempts to talk to her. He doesn’t dare shout at her, because Russel will punch his lights out, but he does start gritting his teeth and snarling and cracking his knuckles. She glares out of the window, and eventually he leaves.

(In the evening, she tries to get into 2D’s room, to see him and make sure he’s okay, but the door is locked. There are new scuffmarks on the wall and door, black shoe rubber and smears of rust-brown, and a fresh splinter in the frame that she knows will annoy Murdoc no end. Not because of guilt, but because he just replaced the doorframe and he hates what he deems a half-finished job. Never mind that he’s the reason the splinter is there, it’s a poor job.)

Though she never finds out what exactly happened to make Murdoc’s temper flare, she knows they fought. Or, rather, Murdoc beat the shit out of 2D and then tried to pretend like he didn’t do a damn thing. Russel wants to beat the shit out of Murdoc, but he is adamant that violence in the household is not okay for a ten-year-old, except when it’s the pretend kind. Drawing blood is not a sport she should be engaging in.

2D never, ever fights back. Sometimes he’ll shout back, but that just makes his bruises worse; sometimes they even split skin.

Noodle feels awful about it all, but she only just about understands the anger in their voices, never mind their words, which are always thick with accents she can’t decipher just yet – extended vowels and dropped consonants all over the place – and she reads the atmosphere better than all that anyway. It’s hard to not know what’s going on when they’re in each other’s faces, voices raised, fists clenched and mouths bloody.

(Later, she will wonder if this is how Murdoc shows affection, but he doesn’t punch her, he buys her chocolate. A different kind of affection maybe. But violence is not the answer, and whenever she tries to tell him that, he tells her to fuck off and leave him be. There is only so much she can do before she gives up on him, and she reaches that point very quickly after they reunite.)

Russel tries to keep her out of the warzone, when there is one, takes her out for lunch at a café, or to buy clothes, or show up the staff in the music store by giving customers more information and better demos than the staff can. But when she realises what his tactics are, she worries. She worries and worries and worries, and nothing Russel does will distract her from the gut-twisting need to get home and make sure 2D is okay.

But with 2D’s door firmly locked against her, and her pleas to be let in thoroughly ignored, there’s nothing she can do. Short of breaking down the door – which she promised not to do anymore, because 2D’d had a girl round, and that had been embarrassing for everybody and she’d seen far more of her not-brother than she’d wanted to, thanks all the same – she’s stuck waiting for him to come out. When these fights first started happening, she used to camp outside 2D’s door and try to wait him out, but he must have come and gone whilst she was asleep, because she didn’t see him once, even though she knows he left the room. Russel kept catching her, too, which didn’t help in the least.

 Russel is great and all, the best man she knows – which says not a lot, truth be told – but he is not 2D. He cannot be 2D, because 2D is one-of-a-kind. Russels are plentiful in the world, she reasons. Decent men who care about their families and love food and music and have weird hobbies and maybe not so much the haunting from a dead soulmate, but definitely the rest. They’re all common in sane people. But 2D is something special.

She misses him something chronic when he locks himself away, and she spends whole days pining, lying listlessly on the floor and whining. Occasionally, she throws a tantrum and screams incoherently into the floor like a toddler. Murdoc says it makes him sick, and tries to form this long speech about how 2D is the weakest link and useless and not worth the tears and the stress of an over-exhausted and incoherent, screaming child, but Russel tells him to shut his rotten cakehole, and Murdoc will stomp off somewhere to get riotously drunk. Noodle remains inconsolable until 2D appears at the foot of the stairs, his worry for her screaming far outweighing a couple of black eyes and a split lip.

(Many, many years later, as they jump up and down atop the radio room and howl, very deliberately out-of-tune, the lyrics to some generic pop on the radio, just to piss Murdoc off and send him into a frothing rage at being disrupted from his piracy, he will tell her that he was always worried her screaming was because Murdoc was – ah – losing his temper with her. She tells him that he could try and she’d have his balls in his eye sockets before he could even raise a fist. 2D cups himself, wincing, but accepts that this is very true.)

Instead of throwing herself to the floor and screaming at the top of her lungs until Russel has to pick her up and squeeze her until she runs out of breath and goes limp, sobbing into his chest, she sits in the den and glares out of the window. Murdoc, having been snubbed once, tries twice more – third time’s the charm – to get her to talk to him, but she ignores him. If he can apologise to her for punching 2D, he can apologise to 2D for punching him. But he won’t, and so she won’t accept his apology when he doesn’t mean it. Russel brings her food that she nibbles at, but doesn’t _eat_. He worries, and she tries to make conversation with him.

‘I miss him,’ she says, and Russel rests a hand on her head.

‘I know, kiddo,’ he says, ‘he’s just upstairs. He’ll be down soon.’

‘Hope so.’

He leaves her alone after that; there isn’t much he can do. She hears him upstairs once, shouting through the door at 2D that she misses him, he’s abandoning her, Murdoc being selfish is enough for the rest of them, stop all this shit. 2D, to her knowledge, ignores him.

If Murdoc hadn’t _said_ 2D had a migraine, she’d have believed it. But knowing he’s in pain, knowing that her big brother with his dopey grin and his bloody 8-balls is _hurting_ and won’t let her help, it kills her inside, just a little.

(A lot. It kills her a lot. It hurts more than she thinks anything else might hurt. Dying must hurt less.)

By the sixth day, Russel is despairing. 2D still hasn’t left his room, and Murdoc is beginning to get antsy. After a long hour spent sat in silence in the den with her, Russel demands, rather than asks nicely, that Noodle accompany him out.

‘We can get 2D something nice,’ he says, and Noodle thinks long enough about it that she knows in half an hour she’ll be heading to London with him to go and buy him an Etch-a-Sketch or something equally silly.

So she goes and showers and puts on clean clothes and brushes her hair for the first time in days, and off they go. Russel tells her jokes, and once, Del manages to force his way out to make a bet about how many hot dogs Russel can eat in one go and Del gets a smile from her, which seems to be enough for the ghost.

(He loses the bet, of course, because Russel’s gut can only take so much mustard. Not that Del minds, because he wants her to enjoy herself. Seeing her so upset hurts in his ethereal bones.)

Having bought 2D a talking Ash Williams and Russel’s stomach making unfortunate gurgling noises, they call it quits and head home.

Russel immediately goes in the direction of the bathroom, and Noodle carefully carries the box, still in its bag, upstairs to try and coax 2D out of his room with it.

(The tactic has not worked yet, but there is a first time for everything.)

She is surprised, however, at the flash of azure that greets her at the end of the corridor.

For a second, she stands there, staring. 2D, amused by her shock, waves. He looks like shit, purple and yellow like a chocolate wrapper, and she squeals, dumps the bag on the floor and not caring if something rattles inside. It doesn’t take half the corridor to build up speed and soon she’s barrelling into him.

The force knocks them both backwards into the wall, and 2D is laughing and crying at the same time, prying Noodle away from him to sink to his knees and curl in on himself.

‘Oh no!’ she cries, horrified, and drops to her knees next to him, hand on his shoulder. ‘Did I hurt you? I’m sorry!’

He wheezes, and draws a hand away from inside his curled-up body to wave her down. ‘I’m fine,’ he laughs, breathless, still whimpering a little. ‘It’s okay.’

She doesn’t believe him, and hovers helplessly whilst he gets his breath back.

‘Ha,’ he wheezes as he straightens, ‘miss me that much, huh?’

‘Yes,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘Of course I did!’

He gets gingerly to his feet, letting her hold his elbow, even though he’s still cupping himself. She smiles up at him, and he smiles back.

‘I missed you too,’ he assures her, and his bruises look awful in the strip-light overhead. They probably look even worse in daylight.

‘I bought you something,’ she tells him, and tugs him down to the other end of the corridor. He limps along with her, wincing with every step. ‘Look, I hurt you. I hurt you.’

‘No,’ he assures her, and raps his knuckles on her helmet. ‘You didn’t. It’s okay.’

She pouts, and he just smiles, asks what she bought.

Jogging off down to the box, she calls over her shoulder, ‘well, Russel bought it. I have no money yet. And I am too – um. I am not old.’

‘I see,’ 2D says, in the kind of voice means, “no, I don’t,” but that’s okay.

She comes back with the box, and thrusts it up towards him, careful to stay out of her arm’s reach. His is twice as long, so he has no problem taking the box from her and pulling it out of the bag. It takes some effort, through the bruises, but he grins at her, thanks her profusely.

They sit there in the corridor and 2D fiddles with the figure, gets him talking and posed just so, and Noodle snuggles into his side, determined to touch him as much as possible. She’s been deprived of him for six days, that’s a lot of cuddles to make up for. No one else cuddles as well as 2D cuddles, and she’ll accept no substitute.

Russel comes across them like that, Noodle dozing and 2D still wincing at the pain between his legs. Chuckling, the drummer ducks to scoop Noodle up and take her off to bed, returning to find 2D up on his feet and limping towards the stairs, figure in hand, the bag with the box in swinging on his arm.

‘What happened to you?’ Russel asks, catching up easily.

There’s a look on his face that 2D doesn’t like much.

‘Noodle,’ he says, jovial to break a tension he knows too well. The same tension that was in the bathroom that night with Paula’s smeared lipstick and Murdoc’s broken zip. He stares straight ahead. ‘She came running and headbutted me in the dick. That helmet is really solid, you know?’

Russel stops dead, and then laughs so hard he has to lean against the wall to catch his breath. A moment passes, and then 2D is laughing as well, and it wakes Noodle up. When she comes to complain about god-knows-what – falling asleep, being woken, waking in her room and not against 2D, whatever it is – they only laugh harder.

Noodle smiles, and holds their hands as they go downstairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- According to 2D’s wiki page, he’s 6’2”, and in phase one, in RotO, Noodle is 3’2”, and that’s the most adorable thing in the universe. She is one inch taller than being exactly half his height, and I’m crying. When you put them into a height generator, she reaches his hip, so she’d be at the right height to headbutt him in the dick.  
> \- I regularly joke that I’m an asshole, but making Murdoc an asshole is really fucking hard.  
> \- My brother has the talking Ash figure, and it’s rad, but it’s the Army of Darkness one, and I forget when exactly that came out, so pretend it’s a figure for Evil Dead.  
> \- I have a thing for platonic/familial hand-holding. Especially for young Noodle, it must be a real comfort. Essex is not at all like Osaka, but I bet it’s overwhelming when you don’t know shit.   
> \- [whispers] Reviews, please and thank.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	5. I'm Good at Repairs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Russel goes to make sure 2D’s alright, and finds him packing his bags. [Phase 0]

After helping Murdoc set his nose – 2D, Russel is sure, would be the only one to miss him if something went wrong in the bastard's nasal cavities and it killed him, and what a sad day that would not be – Russel goes to find 2D. He knows the kid means well, tries hard, but his best mate just fucked his bird. That's not nice no matter who you are.

2D is in his – and not Paula's, because Paula is gone, out on her arse and heading back to Crawley on her own – room, packing his suitcase.

'D? Guy, where you going?'

2D hesitates; he had not intended to see him. 'Home,' he says. 'Staying here, with him, was a mistake.' 2D looks at him then; his eyes look sore, sorer than normal, red and puffy and salt-sticky. He tries for a smile. Misses. 'Come with me. My parents won't mind.'

Russel is tempted, but he knows he can’t leave. Something is tying him to Kong, some demon lurking beneath his feet. Compulsively, he looks; his shadow is a malformed blob between his toes.

‘I can’t,’ Russel says, and sighs. ‘Someone has to make sure Murdoc doesn’t kill himself.’

It’s a shoddy excuse and they both know it.

2D looks somewhere between the screaming and the crying and the howling Russel hasn’t seen since he last saw his friend back in Brooklyn, the one with the toddlers. He’s sure 2D is too old to throw a tantrum like the ones that kid threw, but it’s been a hard night.

‘Fuck Murdoc,’ he grumbles, in the lifeless tone of someone who doesn’t mean what they say.

God, Russel thinks, he’s too nice.

‘D,’ he starts, and then pauses.

Harder than necessary, 2D throws a pair of socks into the suitcase, and they bounce off the metal trim, landing on the floor. 2D kicks them as hard as he can, and stubs his toe on the frame of his bed. That is the boy’s undoing, and Russel grabs him under the arms, hoists him back onto his feet and squeezes him tight. It’s ridiculous, really, 2D is a good half-foot taller than him, a whippet of a boy, but he slumps into Russel anyway, hides his face in his shoulder as he screams and cries and thumps weakly at his bandmate’s – are they still in a band? No, no, _friend_ , they are friends now – _friend’s_ chest. Russel has his arms mostly pinned between them, so there’s barely any force behind the hits.

Russel holds him anyway, doesn’t do him the indignity of shushing him like a child, doesn’t pet his hair or tell him everything will be okay. He just lets him get it out of his system in calm, collected silence, a wall of skin and cotton and warmth accepting what is doled out to him.

When 2D is spent, limp and breathing hard against Russel’s tear-slick neck, Russel finally hushes him, reaches up with a hand to brush through the boy’s hair. He’s only a couple of years older than him, almost three when he does the maths, but he feels so much older. He feels older than Murdoc, certainly, who has over a decade on him.

‘Hush, kiddo,’ Russel hums, and his fingers rub on the knobs of bone pushing against the thin skin on the back of 2D’s neck.

Such a frail kid, really. So easily broken. He’s done well to hold out this long.

‘Why?’ 2D asks, voice choked and thick with salt in the throat. ‘Why did she do that?’

Russel does not miss the pronoun. He absolutely one-hundred-per-cent does not miss that pronoun. He’s going to kill Murdoc dead, fuck keeping him from killing himself through drink and drugs and his own ridiculous concepts of being a mate. Fuck him.

‘Russ?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Can you loosen up a bit, mate? I’m going numb here.’

Flushing, Russel does as asked, but he doesn’t let go. That wasn’t what 2D had asked for, so he keeps his grip, but softer now, lets 2D lean on him rather than pinning him there. Able to breathe comfortably and not as crushed, 2D is happy to stay, to keep his face hidden, to let Russel take his weight. It’s easier than trying to do it himself.

‘It hurts so bad,’ 2D breathes, and he sounds like he’s in pain. Russel would not be at all surprised if the pain is localising behind his eyes, pressing up against the nerves and yanking them. Migraines hurt, and 2D’s are worse than most. ‘Like, in my chest.’

‘Heartbreak’s shit,’ Russel agrees, and pets 2D’s back like he’d pet a cat.

They stand there like that for a few more minutes, tension slowly oozing from 2D’s body before building back up as the pain of sobbing his heart out creeps in.

‘Come on,’ Russel murmurs, as the boy begins wincing and pulling away from his touch, body too sensitive. ‘Let’s get you home, yeah?’

‘I am home,’ 2D whines, and flops onto the bed to press his palms to his eyes.

Russel cannot bring himself to correct him.

Slowly, carefully, Russel hunts down the boy’s medication, and coaxes him into taking it. And if he happens to see Murdoc skulking around when he goes to get a glass of water, well, no one has to know there was a sixth break to the crooked bastard’s crooked nose, did they?

As 2D drifts into sleep, Russel moves 2D’s case onto the floor, leaving it packed for him, before sitting heavily in the chair by the bed, and he contemplates shoving the kid into his jacket and driving him home. But he wouldn’t appreciate being taken home when he’s incapacitated.

The longer Russel sits there, the more he reasons that 2D never really intended to leave. He was going to pack his bags and get to the door and make a big song and dance, and Murdoc would “convince” him to stay. But 2D doesn’t want to leave, God knows he won’t. He’s pinned too much of the blame on Paula. Paula was as responsible as Murdoc. It didn’t even matter who initiated, they are both as bad as each other. Neither should have done it.

But what’s done is done, and Russel is sat watching a twenty-year-old sleep off a broken-heart-induced migraine because said boy’s so-called best friend can’t keep it in his trousers.

‘I never would,’ he murmurs to Del, who Russel imagines would hum back, agreeing whole-heartedly.

It’s quiet in here, 2D’s breathing a little deeper, snotty and tear-thick, a drug-addled haze of a hopefully dreamless sleep. The crows outside caw. Russel imagines he can hear Murdoc, out in the graveyard, cawing back at them, hurling obscenities like the best. It’s about the only thing he’s good at. Russel stays until morning, and the way 2D rolls over to put his hand on the dent where Paula had slept just about breaks _his_ heart.

‘It – happened?’ 2D asks, quiet, crackling fires snagged in the back of his throat.

Russel looks up from a paint-stain on his jeans, and nods.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

2D had been up on his elbows to look at him, but flops back to lie there staring at the ceiling.

‘Oh,’ he sighs, and his hands lace over his belly, as if contemplating.

‘Do you still want to leave?’ Russel asks. ‘It’s early.’

2D considers it.

‘No, I’d better stay,’ he sighs. ‘I owe Murdoc my life, right? Can’t not do this.’

Russel’s _everything_ aches, every organ shattered and twisted and broken for the boy before him.

‘God,’ he sighs, mostly to himself. He has to say something, but what can you say?

2D doesn’t acknowledge him, just lies there. Nicotine has already stained the ceiling, yellowing smears across the flocked wallpaper a lifetime old already.

‘I love her,’ 2D sighs after a moment. ‘Loved, I guess. Can’t love her now.’

For a moment, Russel sits there in silence, and then he suggests that they go out for breakfast. Anything, he thinks to himself, is better than letting him lie here in a room that smells of her and him and the things grown-ups do when they are very much in love. It’s a room full of memories besides, and Russel doesn’t want him staying here to wallow in them.

‘I’ll stay in,’ 2D murmurs in reply, and rolls onto his side, curls into a ball, back to Paula’s side of the bed. ‘You can go, though.’

At the first opportunity, Russel is setting fire to the damn bed and buying him an entirely new one.

‘No,’ he says, and gets to his feet. The chair was not made for extended sitting, which is ridiculous for a chair, but Russel’s arse is killing him. ‘You’re coming out for breakfast. Even if I have to drag you.’

2D does not look fazed by the threat, and Russel wishes he’d gotten here sooner. A week is not a long time, but Murdoc can fit a lot of mischief into a few small hours. Mischief is a polite way to say it, and the thought that he’s making light of the bastard’s behaviour makes him sick.

‘Come on, D,’ Russel tries, and crouches to look 2D in the face. ‘Let’s go out for breakfast, yeah?’

He glances away, thinks. Del sweeps through his veins, an echo of a thought he could have had.

‘We’ll get some water balloons. Throw ‘em at Murdoc.’

Something like a smile flickers, helpless, across 2D’s face. It’s a start.

‘Yeah,’ 2D says after a few moments, having come to a conclusion. ‘Yeah, that sounds good. Bacon butties, yeah?’

Russel nods, grins wide. ‘Of course. And tea, too.’

2D’s smile broadens, defines, missing teeth and gnawed lips, and he looks so young.

Russel helps him to his feet, the painkillers have worn off and he’s a little unsteady. It’s easy to support him by the elbow, lead him through the motions to get him ready, and then he’s leading him out of the door. 2D lets him lead, seems grateful that Russel is doing all the work, and as they sit in a café in London, an hour away from Murdoc and Kong and the smell of 2D’s sheets, Russel tells him awful jokes with awful puns that make him laugh until he’s clutching his belly. People look at them. Russel stares flatly back until they look away.

By the end of breakfast – brunch, really – 2D looks almost normal. Distracted from the thought of last night, and tells jokes back. It fills him with pride, and compulsively, he reaches up to ruffle 2D’s blue hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Clint Eastwood.  
> \- I could have done with a Russel when I had my heart broken lol. Instead I got told to grow up. That’s great, really helpful. Bc angry heartbreak really needs to be made worse.  
> \- I initially wasn't going to write about this particular event, but this is an important moment in 2D and Russel’s friendship development, so in it goes. It doesn’t exactly fit the happy moment criteria, but people asked for Russel’s relationship with 2D so.  
> \- I think the best post-Paula fic I have ever read is Selective Memory by lilbug121. It’s absolutely heart-breaking and I love it and highly recommend it.  
> \- I might do some more with Del I’m not sure.  
> \- We’ll be back to happy moments next chapter, so there’s that, I suppose.  
> \- Man this chapter made me sad. I am so full of regret. Go hard or go home, I guess.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	6. Music We Choose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Family is more than blood, and sometimes it’s easy to forget. [Phase 1]

Noodle isn’t sure where all the crows come from, but she suspects Murdoc feeds them. Either that, or there were more bodies than they thought, and now they’re after the living flesh in the walls of Kong. She shudders at the thought, and 2D reaches over her shoulders to pull the blanket around her further.

They’re watching a film, both of them unable to sleep for the cawing and howling winds, something with songs and bright colours that stain their skin rainbow shades in the darkness of the den. She snuggles closer, finds his fingers.

He flinches away from the contact before seeming to realise, or remember, that it’s her. She can almost communicate now, get across basic ideas and simple sentences. It’s hard going, but they’re getting there. But sometimes he looks at her like he’s forgotten who she is, and she is beginning to understand, from the sad look Russel gives him sometimes, and the way Murdoc occasionally cracks his knuckles instead of pushing them into 2D’s face or belly or arm, that there is something wrong with the poor man. Wrong is perhaps the _wrong_ word for it – ha! – but something happened to him.

Maybe it was like what happened to her, whatever that was. Something that made him forget, only he still forgets now, and the thought of _that_ makes her cling tighter to his hand.

‘Are you alright?’ he whispers.

She nods, and rests her head on his shoulder. It’s not very comfortable, but she stays like that anyway.

They sit in silence for the remainder of the film.

‘That was fun,’ 2D says, and she nods some more.

She’s no more tired than she was before, and when he moves to get up and put the film away, she pulls him close, holds him down. Startled, he blinks at her, 8-balls bloody and darting around the room as if to see what’s bothering her.

She purses her lips, and then says, ‘stay.’

So he stays.

Russel finds them there in the morning, wrapped up in the blanket, 2D snoring away with his head on the back of the couch, Noodle’s face pressed into his shoulder, snoring just as loud. He shakes his head, adjusts the blanket around them, and turns off the looping menu screen for the film they’d watched.

Sunlight is streaming through the window; they’ll be awake soon.

Noodle wakes first, and almost knees 2D in the crotch as she leaps off the couch, hurrying through to the kitchen; the radio is playing, and she can hear Russel talking. Maybe he’s talking to himself, maybe he’s talking to Del. She isn’t sure, but she likes Russel, and it’s a weekend, which means chocolate milk, and she’s all for having chocolate milk first thing in the morning.

Laughing at the sound of her feet pattering across the floor, Russel greets her straight away with an enormous hug that lifts her almost a foot off the floor.

‘Morning, baby girl,’ he coos, and tweaks her nose when he’s set her back on her feet.

She rubs her nose like he’s hurt it – he hasn’t, but it’s part of the routine – and gabbles to him in Japanese before he tells her to slow down, to speak English.

‘I’m sorry,’ he laughs, ‘I don’t get a word you’re saying!’

She takes a breath, because this is very bothersome, and says, slowly, that she and 2D watched a really good movie last night.

‘Yeah? What was it about?’

As he makes her breakfast – reminding her that she needs to brush her teeth after, because God knows Murdoc goes out of his way to not tell her to, and 2D just doesn’t remember that brushing your teeth is important – she tells him, haltingly, struggling to find words for concepts she doesn’t really understand by name, about the film, about the knight being the bad guy, about the one that looked like a bad guy but was really good, and she says, even more haltingly, that he reminded her of Murdoc.

Russel snorts, and puts her plate in front of her, and her attention is immediately diverted.

‘You’re doing real good with your English,’ he tells her, ruffling her hair. ‘I’m really proud of you.’

She beams at him, a mouth full of half-chewed waffle, and he laughs again. She likes Russel best when he’s laughing, so she makes him laugh a lot.

He asks her, as she devours a second waffle, what it is about the protagonist that makes her think of Murdoc, but she’s interrupted before she gets to answer by 2D stumbling in, still wrapped in his blanket, and looking a little lost. Noodle suspects that this is because he fell asleep somewhere he didn’t usually fall asleep, and she’d been with him when he did. So when he woke alone on the couch, he’d been confused. This is fair, she supposes, given that he has trouble with his memory.

‘Good morning!’ she says, and he pauses before smiling at her.

‘Morning,’ he replies, and flops into one of the free chairs. ‘Did you sleep alright?’

She nods, and thanks him for staying up with her. Russel has been teaching her to say please and thank you at every opportunity, and she’s trying hard to remember.

(She likes seeing Murdoc’s face when she thanks him for something, because he looks like she just flicked him on the nose. It’s hilarious, and Del, when he sees it, laughs louder than Russel does.)

‘What did you think of the film?’ she asks, and 2D looks at her blankly.

After a moment, his brain fills in the blanks, and he nods, considers.

‘I enjoyed it,’ he says, ‘it’s not as good as a zombie flick, but it was really nice. I like watching films with you.’

She smiles and nods, and Russel hands 2D a plate stacked high with waffles. Noodle knows that 2D won’t eat half of them, but that’s okay, she will. She likes Russel’s cooking, and there’s no point letting food go to waste. She’s a growing girl, after all.

When they’re done eating, Russel sends them both off to shower and brush their teeth and get dressed. Noodle is happy to comply, but 2D drags his feet. Noodle does not understand why 2D is so reluctant to have direction on his morning routine when he doesn’t do any of it if he’s not told. Maybe he remembers home. Noodle doesn’t remember hers at all, if she had one to begin with. Life seemed to begin in that FedEx crate standing in the hall of Kong with the three faces of her soon-to-be family staring at her in combinations of shock and awe and amusement. It must be nice, having a home.

Later, as they sit doodling on scrap paper waiting on Murdoc, who has again proven himself to be an incredibly late sleeper – Russel gets a look on his face, one that Noodle doesn’t quite get, but accepts that this might be a grown-up thing, and they’ll probably have a fight in the bathroom again – Noodle asks if he goes home at all. 2D looks at her before asking what she means, because this is his home.

‘I mean, um. Your parents. Home.’

For a moment there is silence, and then 2D says that no, no he doesn’t.

‘Oh,’ she says, and frowns at her shark picture, its teeth especially jagged. ‘That’s sad.’

2D hums, and Russel clears his throat. Noodle sits there quietly for a few moments, thinking over the words she needs to say next.

‘Why not?’ is what she decides to ask.

For another few moments, 2D focuses on his castle. Then he puts his pen down and picks at his cuticles.

‘They disowned me,’ he says, quiet.

Russel clears his throat again; he’s trying to get them away from the topic before they get too deep into the reason 2D almost never leaves the studio, why Noodle has never met his parents, when he is clearly the only one with what she’d assume was regular access to them. She thought it was nice having parents.

‘What is “disowned?” Is it bad?’ she asks.

2D scratches at his neck, and his nails leave blossoming red lines down the porcelain of his skin.

‘It’s.’ He stops, and looks over her head at Russel, who looks just as lost. ‘They, um. They don’t want me home no more, yeah? ‘Cause I – I chose this. Music. Murdoc. Over them.’

‘It’s not great,’ Russel offers, trying to find another way of explaining it. ‘If you’re disowned, your family don’t want to see you. You aren’t a part of their family any more, you see? You’ve been cast out.’

Noodle considers this, watching 2D scrape a black felt-tip through the brickwork. ‘Was I disowned?’ she asks, ‘is that why I was in a box?’

Russel shakes his head, and reaches over to ruffle her hair. ‘No, baby girl, no. Not at all. What happened with ‘D’s folks is – it’s. It’s a special case.’

‘Murdoc?’ she asks, because 2D says he chose Murdoc over his parents, and Murdoc is, well, Murdoc.

‘Murdoc,’ he agrees. Carefully, watching 2D’s reactions, he sketches out what happened between them. ‘Murdoc really hurt 2D, yeah? Put him in a coma – a – a big sleep you don’t wake up from. 2D’s parents were real sad because of it, and they made the courts force Murdoc to look after him for – for – ‘

‘Ten hours a week,’ 2D says, and Noodle’s eyes snap back to 2D on her other side. ‘He got to take me out of the hospital, ‘cause I weren’t on oxygen or nothing. I was breathing fine. Just in a coma. So he took me out in his car and woke me up.’

‘He did,’ Russel agrees, and Noodle nods. ‘It wasn’t nice. 2D was very hurt by it. Murdoc is – is.’

‘He saved my life,’ 2D shrugs, and scrawls a big 2-D onto the side of the castle in a red pen, makes it all spiky and decorated. Graffiti. ‘Owe him this. The band. ‘S what he wants, yeah? It’s the least I can do.’

Russel doesn’t look happy about it, but when he sees Noodle looking at him, he clears his features.

‘I guess,’ he agrees, because he doesn’t want to argue the matter. ‘But 2D’s folks didn’t want him to join the band.’

‘But the band’s good!’ Noodle exclaims, and slams her fist on the table, apologising when it startles 2D.

‘We are,’ Russel says, ‘but they didn’t see it like that. Neither of us were here then. It was just Murdoc and 2D, and 2D’s parents didn’t like that. Murdoc’s not a very nice man, Noodle.’

Noodle opens her mouth, is about to say that Murdoc always buys her chocolate whenever he goes out to get cigarettes, but he made her swear not to tell Russel, because Russel threatens to break his nose again (again?) if he catches Murdoc giving Noodle sweets when she’s not supposed to have any. And she doesn’t want to betray Murdoc’s trust. It took a long time (ten minutes, or there about, a laugh and open arms and an outstretched little finger, and he was _hers_ ) to get it, and she doesn’t want him to not like her like he doesn’t like everybody else.

Instead, she hums and frowns at her shark picture.

‘So they do not love you anymore?’ she asks, and glances at 2D from under her lashes.

He looks sad, and she wishes she hadn’t asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ Russel says, ‘and if you went home, they’d welcome you back. They’re just worried about you, ‘D. That’s all. I’d be worried about my boy if he moved out with a certified psychopath.’

‘Who’s a psychopath?’

All three of them jump; Murdoc has, somehow, managed to sneak up on them, and stands leaning against the doorframe with a grin and crossed arms and ankles. He looks like he’s been stood there for a while, but there’s nothing on his face to suggest he heard any of it. Then again, he could just not care. He says that a lot.

Noodle isn’t sure she believes it, but she doesn’t have the words yet to ask about it.

‘You,’ Russel says, with pursed lips. ‘Glad you could make it out of bed before – before one today. Are we going to record, or what?’

Murdoc is still grinning, but it doesn’t reach his eyes any more.

‘Sure,’ he says, and pushes away from the doorframe, swaggers off down the corridor to the stairs.

Noodle grabs 2D’s hand as they make their way to follow him. He squeezes her hand, but says nothing. He has his thinking face on, so Noodle says nothing too, just walks up to the studio with him in easy silence.

Outside the door, Murdoc and Russel already bickering and slamming away at their instruments, trying to drown each other out, Noodle tugs 2D to a stop.

‘It’s okay,’ she tells him, quiet, trying to pull him down to her level.

After a moment, he crouches and meets her eyes.

‘What’s okay?’ he asks, smiles. It’s a sad smile.

She presses her thumbs into his dimples and drags it wider before planting a sloppy kiss on his nose.

‘That you don’t got your parents. You got me, and you got Russ.’

His cheeks relax under her thumbs, his smile genuine.

‘I do,’ he agrees, and his eyes crinkle. ‘I got you, and Russ. And we’ve all got music.’

‘Big family,’ she says, trying to sound sage.

‘Very big,’ he agrees.

Murdoc shouts incoherently from inside, and they hurry in to take their places before he starts throwing things and breaking his amps (again).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- The title is again from 19-2000. There’ll be a lot of that probably.  
> \- I want to say they were watching Shrek, but it’s not out for another year in-story, so perhaps not.   
> \- Is “Murdoc?” “Murdoc.” a DBZ:Abridged reference because it feels like one even though I didn’t mean it to be.  
> \- Murdoc’s not a very nice man or: how do you make that kind of understatement?  
> \- Russ, bab, Murdoc is not a psychopath, he’s just a jackass.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	7. Scary Gargoyle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle and Russel play make-believe and drag Murdoc into it. [Phase 1]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> murdoc is a fucking moron and burns himself deliberately you have been warned

Murdoc is sat at one of the desks in the office, hunched over with his elbows on his knees, gnawing at his thumbnail. He’s reading something on the computer screen, and he’s wearing glasses. Noodle has never seen him wear glasses before, but the font on the screen is very small. She knows 2D wears glasses sometimes, because his eyesight isn’t very good, and migraines make it worse. But Murdoc’s kept that one quiet.

He still clearly thinks he’s alone, occasionally swivelling the chair side-to-side as he scrolls down the page. Sometimes a garish pop-up blasts its way onto the page and he grunts, dismisses it to continue reading.

It’s the first time she’s seen him sat quietly doing something that seems productive, and she hopes the cameras are still functioning so that she can get pictures of it because she doesn’t have a camera. She just has a spray bottle of flavoured water and a cardboard cut-out of a Latin cross.

Feeling not in the least bit guilty, she rears back, kicks the ajar door open with an almighty scream and sprays Murdoc with the water, brandishing the cross.

He just about has a heart-attack, toppling backwards off the chair and landing in a misty heap on the floor, staring at her upside down. His glasses are crooked on his nose.

‘The fuck was that for?’ he yelps, and scrambles to right himself, only to get sprayed again.

‘Bee-gone!’ she cries, and somehow manages to angle the bottle to spray up his nose, forcing him to stay sprawled on the floor, now coughing from the impromptu nasal cleaning. ‘Foul demon!’

He stares up at her in sheer amazement. She waves the cross again. He’s soggy, but certainly not burning. His eyes are watering, and his face is reddening from the rushing blood. But then he starts laughing.

‘No!’ she cries, stamping her feet and spraying him a fourth time for good measure. ‘No! Demon!’

He squints, and rolls off the chair and ignores the repeated spraying to get to his feet and take his glasses off, tossing them onto the desk.

‘Stop it!’ he demands, trying to keep a hand between the nozzle and himself, but he’s laughing, and it’s hard to demand anything when you can barely get the words out. ‘Noodle! Are you trying to exorcise me or something, eh? Stop it!’

She waves the cross some more and when he grabs it, she struggles for it, bracing her feet and yanking. How it doesn’t rip in half he doesn’t know, because they’re both tugging at it, but apparently cardboard is stronger than a grown man and a small child. Who knew? When she realises that he’s not only not reacting to it (which she didn’t expect him to, because it’s only make-believe, but she’s got to _pretend_ ) but not letting go, she cries what he’s sure are prayers in Japanese, throws the bottle at him, and runs, leaving the cross behind. As she barrels down the corridor, she starts calling for Russel. Murdoc gives her a few seconds, and then gives chase, bottle in hand ready to spray her. After a second’s thought, he starts howling like a banshee, and he can hear her screams from three corridors away, gleeful and terrified at once.

(She hadn’t expected him to join in with actual vigour, and the idea that she’s started him on a Dark Path is as terrifying as it is exciting. Murdoc does not often get involved in her games, because he is a Grown Up who does Grown Up Things, so when he does, it’s always nice.)

He’s taller than her by a good foot and a half, but she’s got the bonuses of youth and general good health, and manages to outrun him for several loops of the second floor before he catches up to her as she rushes down the stairs, which take him much less time to traverse thanks to a flagrant disregard for his ankles and left arm which slams into the wall when he jumps the last five steps. He screams the entire way, and Noodle’s cackles echo down the corridor like nails on a chalkboard.

Russel is waiting for him with a super-soaker, and gets him right in the face with it as he hurtles around the corner. Noodle, hiding behind Russel and cackling like the demon she accused him of being, had apparently led him into a trap.

What a little shit.

Spluttering and thoroughly soaked now, Murdoc tries to defend himself with the spray bottle, but there’s no hope, and he resigns himself to it. He even gives a few pitiful moans and sizzles as he sinks to the floor, which only serve to ramp up the volume of Noodle’s laughter. Russel continues to soak him – how much water do these things _hold_? – and manages to get him in the ear, so Murdoc curls up, hissing and moaning the entire time, tries to protect his sorely abused head with his arms.

Eventually, Russel runs out of water, and Murdoc learns later that he had multiple super-soakers, which explained a lot, and Murdoc lies in a heap on the floor, in a puddle, wet and very much “exorcised.”

When he peeks out from beneath a soggy arm, black eye exposed, Noodle is leaning over him.

‘Got him!’ she cries, and pumps a fist. Russel extends a hand and she slaps his palm with her own.

‘Got me,’ Murdoc agrees, and scrubs a hand down his face.

Russel’s hand thrusts itself in the general direction of Murdoc’s face, offering to pull him up, and he takes it, almost gets dragged across the floor instead of upright.

Dusting himself down, he actually takes the other two in, looks at what they’re wearing and raises an eyebrow as he scrapes his wet hair back from his face. It sticks up in about five directions and shows a scar on his temple that Noodle has never seen before.

(It’s from hitting the wheel during the ram-raid, she learns later, and he has a dozen little scars and aches and pains from that day.)

‘What on _earth_ are you doing?’ he asks them, plucking at Russel’s greatcoat and Noodle’s gun-belt.

‘We’re hunting!’ Noodle explains, and pulls another cardboard cross out from one of the shell pockets on the belt. ‘Demons and monsters and stuff!’

 Murdoc tugs uselessly at his shirt, trying to get it to stop sticking, but gives in to ask, ‘can’t you just kill the zombies?’

‘Not fun,’ Noodle says with an upturned chin.

Laughing, Murdoc asks why hunting him is more fun.

‘Because demons!’ she cries, ‘demons are _super_ bad.’

He looks at her for a moment, and then looks at Russel.

‘Go on,’ he says, ‘which one?’

Awkward, a little embarrassed, Russel mumbles, ‘ _Exorcist_. It was in the player in the cinema.’

Of course it was. He glances down at Noodle, who is still looking mightily proud of herself, and brandishes the new cross at him, still cackling like a little monster.

 

\+ + + + +

 

After she’s gone to bed and Murdoc’s hair has dried into a tangled, almost-curly mess of black and the bluish tint of raven’s feathers, he finds the mangled cross in the computer room, crushed by both of their grips, one of the crossbars almost torn off in their brief struggle for it. Dumping it in the bin and flopping back into the wheeled chair in front of the desk he’d been at, he tries for several minutes to finish reading the article he’d been looking at.

It takes him a minute to get distracted by his unmarked palm. He’s got blistered pads and nicotine stains and torn nails, but no Catholic-faith burns.

Noodle’s door is firmly shut, and when he cracks it open to peek around, she’s curled up in bed, the too-big space piled high with cuddly toys and that fucking electronic monkey _thing_ she’s always driving around, and she’s snoring. He hadn’t realised she snored; must be getting ill, he reasons, and fishes a pen out of his pocket to scrawl _cough meds_ on the back of his hand.

Shutting the door as quietly as he opened it, he strolls downstairs and through to the kitchen, where Russel is, apparently, making himself a late-night snack.

‘It’s not going to help you sleep, you know,’ Murdoc says, and laughs when Russel drops an egg on the floor, only narrowly avoiding the next one thrown straight at his face.

‘What are you doing up here?’ Russel asks, frowning before returning to his soon-to-be-scrambled eggs. ‘Thought you’d be down in the camper by now.’

Murdoc shrugs and rifles through the drawers for the broken spatula he knows they’ve still got. He won’t admit he’s the reason it's broken, but he finds it, and slots the handle into his palm, looking at it critically.

‘What are you doing?’ Russel repeats, quieter, frowning at him.

‘Nothing at all,’ Murdoc replies even though he is quite clearly up to no good when he lights one of the other rings and holds the spatula over it.

‘Murdoc,’ Russel warns, in the sort of tone he’s heard a thousand times.

If the next words out of his mouth aren’t, “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Russel is a fucking moron. But those are the exact words he says.

‘Your opinion is appreciated,’ Murdoc hums, and turns the rod to heat the other side. ‘But ignored.’

‘You aren’t going to be able to hold your bass for _days_ ,’ Russel tries, ‘if not _weeks_. That’s going to be a third-degree.’

‘I’m not going to burn my fucking hand off,’ Murdoc snorts, ‘just blister the skin. I know what I’m doing, shut up and get out of my way.’

It’s like watching a pile-up on the highway, whenever Murdoc does something like this. You can’t look away because the sheer amount of _idiocy_ that goes into one of these half-cocked schemes of his is absolutely fascinating. How the man made it to thirty-two is beyond all knowledge, Russel is sure. There must be a record for the amount of bad ideas you can have in such a short space of time, and Murdoc must surely hold it.

The steel turns red hot and the plastic still on the end begins to bubble.

‘Why?’ Russel implores, because this is the stupidest “let’s mutilate my own body in the name of a cheap laugh” thing Murdoc has ever done. ‘She’s not going to be impressed, you know. She’s going to be terrified.’

When it gets no response, he grumbles to himself, ‘need to section the mad bastard. Put him in a padded room.’

‘I was born in an asylum,’ Murdoc hums, and holds the spatula up to his face, studying it. ‘Hm, that’ll have to do. Not my first choice.’

‘Your first choice an actual _cross_?’ Russel spits, and Murdoc slides his gaze over. His red eye is especially red in the heat coming off the rod.

‘No,’ Murdoc says, and without any elaboration, takes a breath. He is not _immune_ to pain.

His skin sizzles when he closes his hand around it, and he grunts. He only holds on for a few seconds, but those seconds feel like a lifetime. Smoke comes off both his hand and the rod, and Russel has the tap running before Murdoc’s even let go. Shoving the man to it, rod forgotten on the floor and burning a hole in the lino, Russel makes sure Murdoc isn’t about to die before throwing the contents of the long-cold kettle onto the rod before it sets fire to the kitchen. How it doesn’t set the smoke alarm off, he doesn’t know.

‘Smoke alarm doesn’t work,’ Murdoc says, sounding surprisingly calm for a man who just put second-degree burns into his palm for his kind-of-not-really adopted daughter. ‘Hasn’t worked since 2D tried to cook that streaky bacon.’

Russel remembers coming downstairs to a chorus of swearing and screaming in what he was convinced was three languages (it was two, English and Japanese, but Murdoc had temporarily forgotten how to enunciate and 2D was hysterical) and finding Noodle on her arse on the floor, clutching her wrist, Murdoc drenched and 2D covered in ash. There was an enormous amount of smoke coming off of the hob, an even more enormous amount of water all over the walls and floor, and they’d all looked at Russel when he entered.

A frying pan had been ruined and Murdoc had to send off for a new set of rings because 2D had managed to set fire to _all four_ of them. Noodle had, apparently, managed to punch the smoke alarm into silence, but sprained her wrist doing it.

They’d – wisely – chosen to not let 2D cook after that.

For several long moments they stand there in a smoky kitchen stinking of burning skin, Murdoc with his hand under running water, looking at the blistering skin with pride, and Russel with his intact, uninjured hands on his face, staring in dismay at the bubbling lino and smoking metal.

‘I just wanted scrambled eggs,’ he sighs, ‘why do you bring this trouble here, man? Why?’

Murdoc shrugs, utterly unapologetic. ‘She looked really upset that I didn’t burn.’

‘The cross was _cardboard_ ,’ Russel says, emphatic, and then, ‘it was _make-believe_.’

‘I sold my soul to the devil to get my band international chart success,’ Murdoc throws back, looking not as unaffected as he had a moment ago; there is definite pain in the way his jaw tightens. ‘I’ll play make-believe exorcisms all I fucking want if it makes her happy.’

Russel doesn’t have a reply for that, and just stands there clutching his face.

After patting his hand dry with some kitchen roll, Murdoc stomps off to the bathroom in search of the burn cream he is positive they have. 2D is prone to touching the pipes, so they have to keep some on hand just in case.

In the morning, when Noodle comes out of her bedroom to head for the kitchen, sleepy-eyed and clutching one of the oversized soft toys 2D bought for her on a random venture into London, she passes Murdoc on the stairs as he heads for the studio. He deliberately waves with his burnt hand.

She stops dead, and he glances at her as he reaches the top. She’s staring straight ahead, back stock-straight.

‘Russel?’ she yells when her sleepy head has caught up, and rushes downstairs. He hears her feet pitter-patter like a herd of elephants down the corridor beneath him towards the kitchen, ‘Russel, it worked! Murdoc’s burnt! Russel!’

Murdoc tries not to laugh his way into the studio, and fails rather miserably.

Second-degree burns with blisters that’ll last for days and a pain that makes him want to cry?

Totally worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Rhinestone Eyes.  
> \- I don’t know what Murdoc’s reading, but it must be interesting. I’d have said a medical journal if it was Phase 2, but alas. Also, 2D would 100% need glasses if he’s not legally blind, and I can’t imagine Murdoc wouldn’t need some.  
> Whose idea was it to let a ten-year-old watch The Exorcist? 2D probably left it in at the cinema and Noodle watched it. Props to her for just going all-out on demon-hunting instead of shitting herself, though. Mind you, it’s not that scary lmao.  
> \- Murdoc needs to not go so far in the name of Noodle’s happiness, I swear to God. Next thing you know, he’ll actually go to Hell for her.  
> \- I’m not a big fan of bacon personally, but literally every time someone cooked bacon when I was at uni, the smoke alarm went off.  
> \- I feel like 2D would buy Noodle that giant shit bitch you is fine soft toy bear that does the rounds on tumblr. I want that bear.  
> \- I should re-title this series “How to be a Responsible Grown-Up by Murdoc Niccals,” I really should.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	8. Shoeshine Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Saturday mornings are Noodle's favourite mornings. [Phase 1]

Saturday mornings are Noodle’s favourite mornings; Murdoc and 2D are almost always nowhere to be seen, which means she gets free reign of the cinema, Russel lets her have chocolate milk with her breakfast rather than strawberry, and they always go to the local market for fresh food and pointless things they don’t need but like. She always makes sure to buy the other two something, just so they don’t feel too left out. 2D now has a rather impressive collection of kids toys – he’s really taken to _Beyblade_ recently, so she thinks she’ll get him another pack of the tops – and Murdoc must have a couple dozen garishly ugly tobacco tins by now, resplendent with scantily-clad ladies and grim reaper bikers and other ridiculous designs that he seems to enjoy. She thinks she’ll get him one with a smiley face on this time, because he’s been remarkably grumpy this week, even by his standards. She doesn’t really understand it, but she thinks some gossip magazine has said something about him he didn’t want said. He’s been distant and Russel clingy, but she doesn’t know for sure.

Still, Murdoc being an old man won’t bring her day down any and she bounds downstairs to the kitchen, and to breakfast.

‘Ruh-saul!’ she cries, and he laughs, scoops her up for a big hug and over-exaggerated kisses that make her squeal and wrinkle her nose.

‘Noodle!’ he cries back.  ‘Good morning, sweetheart. Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ she hums, and holds him a little longer. It’s cold this morning, and they’ll have to tell Murdoc about the heating. Winter’s not far away, and they’ll need it in this big place. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good,’ Russel says, and slowly lets her go. ‘You up for town today?’

She nods and Russel sets about making them both breakfast. His first port of call is the chocolate milk, which he sets in front of Noodle with a ruffle to her helmet-flat, sleep-mussed hair. She thanks him and sips nicely at the glass, waiting for her pancakes.

Breakfast eaten, she hurries back upstairs to shower and brush her teeth and dress. Russel is waiting for her in the foyer, car keys in hand.

‘Is that Murdoc’s car?’ she asks, hopping to pull on her shoes.

The keyring has a battered metal winged skull on it, so of course its Murdoc’s car.

‘He isn’t going to need it today,’ Russel shrugs, and looks at her feet. ‘Are your shoes too tight?’

Noodle considers it.

‘A little,’ she admits, and tries to wiggle her toes.

Frowning, Russel leads her down the steps to the car park, and watches her walk.

‘We’ll get you new shoes,’ he says with a resolute nod. ‘A couple of pairs.’

‘Red ones?’ she asks, and sighs as she drops into the passenger seat.

As Russel fiddles with the seat, because Murdoc has longer legs but a shit posture, he tells her that they’ll see what they can find. He can’t imagine they won’t fit any red shoes in her size, not in town.

‘Good,’ she says, nodding. ‘That’s good.’

She so rarely gets to sit in the passenger seat that she spends the hour or so drive fiddling with the contents of the glove box. Russel occasionally glances at it when the road is clear or he’s at a stop light, and almost always winces. Granted, this is Murdoc’s car, and really Russel should know better than to have not stopped her, but come on man, have a bit of decency.

At least he’s prepared for all eventualities, he supposes.

And at least Noodle can’t read the labels and almost definitely doesn’t know what half of the things are. She knows the cigarettes, of course, and purses her lips in a way that seems much too old for her ten-year-old face, because though Murdoc’s stopped smoking in the car when she’s in it, he’s still smoking.

Russel does not really have much ground to stand on, but still.

When they reach town, the market is already in full swing. This is fine by both of them, because the bustling atmosphere reminds them of _home_. It’s partly why they’re glad 2D and Murdoc don’t come with them; neither are particularly great with large crowds, too fond of personal space and too used to the privacy and solitude of empty streets. But Noodle remembers the swell of bodies and noise and life of Osaka, dreamlike and long-ago, and Russel remembers the heat and the laughter and the smell of Brooklyn. It’s a little slice of home, even though the accents are wrong and the goods are different and everything is a little more English grey.

It’s nice, though. Something they alone share.

They go to Crawley for 2D’s consultations once a month, and Stoke is on the news sometimes. This is not something the other two could share, not with their hometowns.

So they hold hands tight so they don’t get separated, and make their way stall to stall, taking time to poke around the indoor market and Russel eyes up the price of fish and cheese and fresh fruit and veg. Noodle convinces him that Murdoc absolutely needs a tobacco tin – ‘Noods,’ Russel laughs, ‘he doesn’t even roll his own, what’s he going to do with all of these?’ – and drags him around for almost half an hour before deciding that there were no tops here she could get for 2D. They’d have to go to a chain store for those, she supposes.

‘Hey,’ Russel says, when Noodle begins lagging after an hour. It’s easy to scoop her up and carry her across his back. ‘We still need to get you shoes.’

‘Oh,’ she says, and rests her chin on his shoulder, her breath warm across his chilly ear. ‘Yeah.’

So off they head to the sports shop. Trainers are not really good for her to wear every day, but they make her happy, so trainers it is.

(Murdoc keeps trying to convince her to wear boots, big heavy things with steel and laces and skull designs on the toecaps, but Noodle isn’t interested in them. She wants trainers with wheels and light up soles, and that’s it. Hopefully, she can find red ones.)

The sports shop smells like Lynx Africa, and new shoes, and the bass of the music on the radio reverberates through Russel’s feet.

‘God,’ he sighs, because he hates sports shops.

Noodle is in her element though, and he lets her rush off, following along behind her to sit on the bench and wait for her to return with shoes. Her feet are only tiny, so her sizes are on the bottom shelves.

She comes trotting back with several boxes in her arms.

‘These are right?’ she questions, and he goes over the sizes to make sure.

‘Yep,’ he nods, and pats the space next to him.

She doesn’t need him to tie her shoelaces for her – though he isn’t too unhappy about that, it’s not like she’s a little one any more, a toddler needing help with every little thing – and she’s happy enough to potter about testing the shoes out. She makes him prod at her toes to check the space, though, because, as she tells it, she’s not sure how much room there should be.

Three pairs in hand – one to wear now, two more as spares – half an hour later, they head on out, Russel carrying the bag with the shoes in, Noodle’s hand safely tucked back into his. She’s walking much easier now, skipping to test the shoes out.

‘What say we get lunch?’ he asks, and she nods vigorously.

‘And then too-chee’s tops?’

‘Sure thing. Then the groceries, unless there was something else you wanted to look at?’

She promises to think about it over lunch, and they stop by one of the market cafés to stock up on energy. When they’re settled in, food and drinks on the table and all necessary condiments (2D has taught Noodle how to smother absolutely everything in ketchup, and Russel tries desperately to get her to stop, but it hasn’t worked yet) he asks why she uses “chee” when naming 2D.

‘I mean, you don’t have any trouble with your Ds,’ he adds.

Noodle sits there chewing at her sandwich for a few moments as she considers. Her English is getting there, but she has trouble relaying conversations, and the way she lingers makes Russel realise she’s trying to convert thoughts she’d never considered into English.

‘Ah,’ she says, and puts her sandwich down. She dusts her hands off on her sweater – another habit picked up from 2D, and he’ll have to get her to stop that, too – and fiddles with her straw. ‘Um. Ah. Well. Um.’

‘You don’t have to explain it if you’re struggling,’ Russel hurries to offer, and she shakes her head.

‘It’s fine,’ she assures him. ‘I just – Muds said once. He said, um. Ah. He said Two-Chee was. Um.’

She tries to think of the words, but can’t and makes grabby gestures with her hands.

Russel does not know what she means, and tells her as such, apologising.

‘Hm,’ she says, and eats another mouthful of sandwich as she considers further.

He waits patiently, eating his own sandwich in a peace he doesn’t get when the other two are around, because then there are food fights and old-marriage bickering and he can’t have five minutes with them in public. How they made it this far is still somehow so beyond him.

‘He said that Two-Chee touches a lot. Feels.’

‘Touchy-feely?’ Russel offers, and she nods vigorously.

‘Yes! That!’

‘Touchy,’ Russel says then, mostly to himself, and the link slots effortlessly into place. ‘Oh, I see. Touchy is Too-Chee. I understand.’

She nods. ‘I’ll try to stop saying it like that. I know his name is Two- _Dee_ , but, I.’

‘It’s habit now, I get you. You don’t have to stop,’ he assures her, ‘he doesn’t mind at all.’

After getting a little more reassurance, she goes back to eating her sandwich. Russel remembers first meeting Murdoc, the sprawl of his accent, elongated vowels all over the place. It was around the time Noodle started picking up English as more than just words that he started smoothing it out, dragging himself further south on the accentual map so she could understand him better. It’s about the nicest thing he’s ever done in the months Russel’s known him.

Once they’re done eating and Noodle’s been to the bathroom, they carry on, going to _Woolworths_ for 2D’s tops and Noodle deliberates for what Russel is convinced is entirely too long over two pieces of coloured plastic that look exactly the same, but he dutifully reads the descriptions to her, and she eventually chooses the purple one instead of the green one. As they head back to the market to pick up groceries, she tries to explain, for what she’s sure is the hundredth time, all about them, but Russel just stares blankly. Explaining these things is like explaining video games to Murdoc; he just _doesn’t get it_.

She tries not to despair, but she frequently has no other option. Her boys are fantastic in many aspects, but 2D is the only one that really gets these kinds of things. Games and stuff. Russel and Murdoc just _don’t_ understand.

Mind you, she and 2D aren’t really the best people to explain it, either; she doesn’t have the words, and 2D just sort of gestures and ums and ahs about it until he gives in with a scratch of his head.

 It’s all very sad.

She’s good whilst Russel buys food – she finds it _boring_ , but Russel was nice enough to hang about whilst she chose presents for the other two and tried on shoes – and even helps carry some of it back to the car.

‘All in all,’ Russel says on the drive home, ‘a good morning, yeah?’

She nods, kicking her feet in her shiny new shoes. They’ll be ruined by the end of the month, he’s sure, worn to destruction if the zombies don’t get there first.

‘Very good,’ she agrees, ‘thank you for taking me.’

He laughs, and reaches over to pat her head. He would ruffle her hair, but she insists on that helmet. 2D tells her it’s cool and he’s jealous of it, so she refuses to take it off.

They pull into the car park an hour or so later, and the lights in the camper are still off. Noodle helps him take everything up to the kitchen and then asks who is the better bet at – at – she’s still learning how to tell time.

‘Ten-past twelve,’ Russel says, and she frowns at the clock.

‘Big hand on ten,’ she mumbles to herself, and he nods.

‘Who’s awake at ten-past twelve?’ she asks.

Russel considers it.

‘Probably D,’ he says, and she nods, rifles through the bags on the table for the Woolworths bag before shoving it to her elbow and reaching for him.

When he ducks down she presses a big sloppy kiss to his cheek and hurries off to the stairs to go and present 2D with his gift. He smiles after her before turning his attention to the groceries.

(Del fights his way out in less than half an hour to take over as referee for a showdown between Noodle and 2D. The first pair of Noodle’s shoes are ruined in less than a month. Murdoc manages to lose this latest tobacco tin in ten days but maintains that it is somewhere in Kong like the other two dozen. Russel is not sure he believes him.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title adlibbed from 19-2000.  
> \- It was around 2001 that Beyblade became super popular. Except more beyblade shenanigans. Disclaimer: I was too busy refereeing YGO matches in middle school, and have no idea how beyblades work so expect me to cock it up.  
> \- At least Murdoc’s keeping condoms in the car, I guess? No excuse to not use one if they’re in the glove box.  
> \- Murdoc is trying to convince Noodle to wear New Rocks, which are the least suitable shoes for a ten year old in the history of bad shoe choices, because Murdoc is a fucking moron. It’s a recurring theme.  
> \- Apparently Lynx (Axe) Africa is the most popular one in the UK, and has been for 16 years, and that explains why every boy fucking reeks of it, get that shit out of here. It’s better than that godawful chocolate one, I guess.  
> \- Phil Cornwell is incredible as a drunken mess, but where the fuck is that Stoke accent where is it where are the extended vowels? He gets the tics so good but the accent is shite, it really is.  
> \- This one feels really weak? Russ is really hard to write, IDK, I hope you guys enjoyed it anyway.   
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	9. Nature's Corrupted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murdoc dreams of a time he was, and a time he wasn't. [Phase 2]

‘ _Leave him alone_.’

Noodle ignores the instructions, the whispered plea, and crouches as low as she can, sliding first one foot, and then the other, out from beneath her to sit on her arse on the floor, neck crooked to peer up. Murdoc is slumped in his chair, leaning up against the wall, fast asleep. Fast is perhaps not the right way to describe it; he’d been lagging for days, the heat of the desert making him unbearable, itchy and fidgety and insufferable. None of them enjoy the heat, but it was Murdoc’s idea in the first place. He only has himself to blame. Sleeping is all Noodle wants to do, but Murdoc, apparently, cannot sleep without the rain-cool dirt of the underground car park at Kong.

They’ve been here for a week and they haven’t even finished yet. One of the cameras got sand in it, so now they’re waiting on a replacement, and there are only so many jokes you can tell and shadow puppets you can make before the squalling children Murdoc likes to pretend he kidnapped grate.

And so Murdoc took to hiding away in the hotel, a cramped little place on the edge of town with faulty air conditioning and free water, slowly losing the battle with sleep. Noodle rarely sees him sleep anymore; she’s a big girl now, aware of the past that once haunted her dreams, and it’s only when something rattles her – something on the news perhaps, or a particularly ugly letter from a fan that wishes her dead, or wishes to do things to her that makes her blush and burn the letter on the spot lest one of the boys find it and start a manhunt – that she seeks out the body-warm and sweat-sticky comfort of Murdoc’s bed.

It reminds her of being small, of being that little girl from the FedEx box, and she doesn’t much associate with her now, but –

But sometimes she likes the weight of Murdoc’s limbs, the prickling heat of his breath on her scalp, the knowledge that there might still be zombies, there might be people who wished her and him and _them_ dead, but right there, right in that second, his heart thumping in her ear, she is _safe_.

Even then, when she saw him sleep there, it was a brief glimpse, a moonlight shadow across his relaxed features. He could have been handsome in that light, if she could recall the memory properly. Here, in this too-hot hotel with exhaustion gnawing at his bones, he just looks old and tired and _devoid_. It’s not emptiness, no, no that’s different. It’s just – just – he is just _devoid_. Devoid of what, she doesn’t know. But he is.

He looks troubled, but he always does these days. He never talks about it, but something is haunting him. Russel thinks it’s Mexican prison, but Noodle disagrees. This is something external, something beyond stereotypes of what happens to boys like him in places like that, something darker.

Sometimes, she sees a flicker of a shadow in her periphery, and when she looks at Murdoc, he has that look in his eyes. The haunted, desperate look he gets when he realises he’s trapped. What’s trapping him, she doesn’t know, but those are the looks that she’s learnt mean she needs to get herself between him and 2D and fast.

(No matter how old they get, no matter what they do and don’t do, what they see and what they become, no matter what, he can’t raise his voice to her, never mind his hand. She uses it to her advantage at every opportunity.)

Still, Murdoc’s been on his feet for days, pacing and pacing and pacing, smoking through several dozen cigarettes and drinking more than she’s sure someone of his height and weight can take, regardless of his tolerance for it, especially with how little he eats. None of them want to eat in this heat, but they all know they need to. But not Murdoc. He runs on empty as default.

His continued living is a medical marvel, and she thinks she should send his case study into a scientific journal.

 He’d slowly fallen asleep sat in the chair by the window, watching the world crawl by several stories below until eventually he was gone completely, breathing soft and totally still in his seat. They hadn’t even noticed at first, but now Noodle is _fascinated_.

‘ _Noodle!_ ’

‘Just a minute,’ she whispers back, tilting her head further to get under the shadow of Murdoc’s lowered face.

His eyes are shut, eyebrows lax. Mouth just that little bit open in the one corner where his jaw doesn’t quite match up any more. (Russel does not take credit for breaking it, just the last five fractures to his nose, but he wishes he could.) His dark circles are reddened bruises, sore and rusted with the grit of sleepless nights, his face pale, wan. The vest he wears most days hangs more than it did when they got here, and he’s beginning to peel from the sunburn on his arms. She can see the coil of one of the octopus’s tentacles around his wrist, the red a little faded. Or maybe it’s the sunburn. Honestly, they kind of blend. He’s lost weight, too much weight, but she knows they’ll be able to put it back on again soon.

(He likes being around her, and Russel has long since put her in charge of plying Murdoc with food. 2D is more amiable to eating, but he still has to be reminded, and sometimes forced, to actually chew and not just stare at his plate like _some kind of moron_. Murdoc requires a special touch, her touch, fingers on the crease of his elbow, smile soft, and sometimes he looks at her like she blinds him, like seeing her _hurts_ him in some way.)

Hands folded in his lap, and she carefully eases the unlit cigarette from between his fingers, slots it back into the tin on the side. He’s re-taken to rolling his own recently, and though the habit is disgusting, she likes watching his fingers move. Every cigarette is perfectly even, looking every bit as manufactured as the ones he normally smokes. She suspects that it’s not just tobacco in the roll-ups, but she can’t bring herself to say anything about it. The stress of – of _this_ – is beginning to deepen the lines of his face, the ones that had begun to crease with laughter and familial fondness shadowed once more by the demons he can’t shake.

‘He looks so _normal_ ,’ she whispers.

‘ _For chrissake, let’s just go_.’

Rolling her eyes, she waves him away, and stays sat there watching him. He needs his rest, after all, and she’ll be able to make sure he’s getting it this way.

A door shuts; they’re alone.

Murdoc continues to sleep.

He does not often dream, being that he rarely gets deep enough for REM, only vaguely remembering the odd broken-brake squeal or a sobbing woman or a raging fire after he wakes. Disjointed images at best, half-forgotten memories and unformed emotions attached to events. He does not, unless he has something incredibly potent in his bloodstream, have lucid dreams.

And yet here he is, a memory he’d forgotten but could never have had. Winding paths trodden into swamps and plains and rockeries, wind blowing _through_ him, rather than against him. He’s incorporeal and yet very much real, moving between seconds. His cloak swishes around his ankles, caught by the howling wind where he is not, and he walks towards smoke on the horizon. The walk has taken him weeks, the drudgery of a dreamworld, forever moving without taking a step forward.

The smoke on the horizon is the smoke of War. He recognises his stench well, iron and fire and blood, and Death, too, is at his side. The most familiar lover, a long time conspirator, sweeping the battlefields clean of the tokens of affection left him by his oldest friend. They are not the trailblazers here, they are feeding off of the desperation created by their brothers, Famine and Conquest tearing lands asunder until all that remains is the inevitability.

Once, he was that inevitability, he was that dark fear lingering in the heart of man. But no longer. He is beyond that, transcendent of all the earthly wiles. He lingers only to see, to watch and reminisce. But he is _strong_ still, more powerful than all of them.

A powerful ally in the war to come. Revelation, they call it. Battles will be fought, and he will prove victorious, the most faithful son to a father long since forsaken.

The wind catches under the brim of his hat and he tugs it straight, blinking hair from his eyes. His fingers click with every movement, each joint rotten and corroded, festering ill-will in the blackened veins piecing him together.

Another day’s walk, and he sees a fifth rider, willowy and lost, the youngest sibling sent out to play by a mother ignorant of her children’s games. There is no place for him in this world, nor the one below, and he extends his hand, an invitation. Join me, the open palm offers, I will care for you.

The grip he receives crushes his fingers, and all he does is throw his head back and laugh.

The action causes his crown to knock against the wall, and he jolts awake, startled to find himself in the hotel. Noodle is sat by his feet, watching him. He grimaces, rubs the back of his head.

‘The fuck you lookin’ at?’ he grunts when she doesn’t look away, and drags an aching hand down his face. He can taste sulphur behind his teeth, tar-thick and just as black, rotten to the core.

‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispers back, reaching out to touch his calf, in what he’s sure she thinks is a comforting gesture.

But it’s whisper-soft, like a breeze around his ankles, and he jerks his leg back, gets shakily to his feet and goes to wash the taste out with some of that fruity water the staff keep shoving their way.

‘Murdoc,’ she says, and he ignores her, throws three more glasses of water down his throat before the taste is gone. ‘You’ll be sick.’

‘So be it,’ he sniffs, and stretches his fingers out, each joint cracking with the movement.

She’s at his chest now, barely a foot taller than she had been when they arrived, and she has that wrinkled-nose, grumpy cat face she gets sometimes, when she disapproves but knows arguing will get her nowhere.

‘You need to sleep,’ she tries instead, and he looks at her.

‘Why? My devilishly handsome face not up to scratch?’ he asks, trying for jovial and missing by a solid six feet.

She does not look impressed, and he doesn’t know why he expected her to. She reaches up to brush her thumbs across his cheeks, barely touching the dark circles. He winces, draws back. It hurts more than he would have thought it would. Fuck all.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he tells her, ‘it’s too fucking hot. ‘Sides, we’ll be done with this shitshow of a video soon. I’ll sleep on the plane.’

It’s an eleven hour flight. They’ll all be sleeping that journey away.

She gives him some serious side-eye that makes him hesitate.

‘Wot.’

‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘just – you looked. Troubled.’

‘Well, I ain’t gonna go track down dentface for a rematch, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just. I had a weird dream, was all.’

She gives him another look and _he_ looks about ready to – to – flick her nose, or something equally nose-related.

‘Noodle,’ he sighs, because he doesn’t know what else to do with her. ‘Look, I’m alright, yeah? I’m just tired and hot and cranky. I’ll be better when we’re back in England.’

‘What did you dream of?’ she asks.

Something passes over his face. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says, and she sees that shadow flicker in her periphery again. ‘It was. It was – not a memory. But something – it was.’

She nods, and wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his sternum so that she doesn’t have to see the expression on his face any more. He smells of his cigarettes and sand and sweat, and a little of that unquantifiable _home_ she associates with him, with the feel of him, the heat and jut of bone and well-worn cotton. ‘I know. I’ve had dreams like that. Like you don’t know if it’s a memory of your life, or if you just saw something on the TV. It’s like it’s not you, but it feels so real.’

‘Yeah,’ he sighs, rests a palm heavy on her head. His fingers smooth over her hair, and rest on her neck. She doesn’t protest when his fingers press hellishly-hot against her pulse, just angles her head to give him room to feel it. ‘Something like that.’

They stand there in silence for a few moments before 2D and Russel come barging in, joking and laughing about something the two guitarists never quite understand. Either not noticing the tension, or choosing to ignore it, they announce that the new camera has arrived, so they can start filming, _thank God_.

Noodle keeps watching him for the rest of the day, and it’s actually quite off-putting. They don’t really have to do much, it’s mostly just standing around, and that suits Murdoc fine, because he’s distracted by a swirling sand cloud on the horizon, a breeze kicking it up into coils of motion not unlike the smoke on the horizon from all those centuries ago.

(On the flight home, she sits next to him, sandwiched between him and 2D. All four of them sleep straight through, Russel only waking once or twice to talk to the pilot. Murdoc dreams once, the smell of artificial strawberries and cigarette smoke under his nose, open arms tugging him in to whisper in his ear. Heavy accent, praise he never expected, thanks for a left-hook into a jaw, a warm mouth on his cheek, wet with tea and warm with love. It’s a faded dream, softer, pastel sunlight rather than swirling dust, and he turns in his seat a little, angles into Noodle. She registers his motion, presses closer, shoulder tucking under his arm, pulling it closer like a cuddly toy. She squeezes tight, cutting off circulation, laces her fingers into his. Her head rests in the dip of his shoulder, cheek pressed against sun-hot skin. His cheek lowers against her crown, breathes the smell of her in. They wake in Stansted, and Murdoc presses a kiss to her hair before pulling away to go and find the car.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Rhinestone Eyes.   
> \- The shadow on the periphery is the Boogieman. Who shouldn’t be around until phase 3, but hush. I have plans. Maybe.  
> \- I feel like Murdoc’s the kind of guy to go for extended periods without sleeping. After all the deals he’s made and shit he’s done, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if he’s had a few cases of sleep paralysis that got a little too real [coughs succubi coughs]  
> \- I love the Rhinestone Eyes storyboard so much though, like, can we get a kickstarter to raise funds for that because I’m not being funny but I need that.   
> \- Not much else to say about this one to be honest.   
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	10. Rhythm Romancin'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys have passed out, but Noodle is still going, so Del keeps her company. [Phase 1]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> minor body horror for Del

It’s been a long day, and an even longer night. They’d been in the studio for hours, practicing and practicing and practicing until Noodle’s fingers ached (and Murdoc’s bled, more than once, thumbnail torn to the base) and 2D coughed and scratched and whined his way through several bottles of water and enough tea to make him piss like a horse.

Murdoc, Russel says, is a hard taskmaster, but at least he’s focused on the band, on them being the absolute best and not some mediocre tripe played on every radio station ten times an hour to save them from obscurity. His wrists are aching from keeping the beat, and he sticks them in the fridge for a few minutes under the pretence of looking for cheese.

But though practise with instruments is done, Murdoc is not done with them as a band, as a cohesive unit. He says some absolute horseshit about “team-bonding” activities, when really he just wants some company. He gets lonely sometimes, Del reasons, because Murdoc is the kind of man you can only handle in small doses before wanting to knock his teeth out. At least he got all that sorted out fairly early on, the ghost thinks to himself, and feels the pulse of Russel’s agreement rush along the platelets in his blood. He has shitty-looking fangs for all public images now, because he wants to keep the “living garbage” look he’d spent twenty years cultivating, but at home, away from the cameras, he looks almost normal. Still crooked, still washed-out and sickly and _off_. But normal.

So they end up in the games room, all four of them failing miserably at beating the AI on the racing game, playing until late in the morning.

Wait. Late in the evening. Early in the morning. Somewhere between the two. Time means nothing when you’re dead, it all sort of blends together.

 Russel tries to convince Murdoc that Noodle needs to go to bed, but Murdoc, who has been building a pyramid of empty cans for the last three hours, using all three of the boys’ drinks because Murdoc drinks a lot but not _that_ much, outright refuses to acknowledge such a thing, and tells her that she can stay up as long as she wants.

Noodle, who understands that Murdoc has just abolished arbitrary bedtime, at least for tonight, is eager to stay up as late as she possibly can.

So now, half a pyramid later, and the dawn just about to begin poking over the horizon through the thick smog, she’s the last one standing. Russel is asleep in one of the armchairs, face pressed into the wing and snoring like a bear. 2D and Murdoc are sprawled over each other on one of the couches, drunk off their arses and sure not to rise until the afternoon at least.

Del takes the opportunity to spend some time with Noodle away from the boys. They can be such a terrible influence on her. Russel tries to be good, to counteract what Murdoc and 2D do, but Del’s continued existence just goes to show how broken Russel is.

‘Hey, lil’ lady,’ he hums, and yanks himself free of Russel’s form, both feet firmly on the carpet.

She beams up at him, and offers him a controller. Flopping beside her, incorporeal limbs safely tucked in under himself, he takes the controller, and asks her for the buttons.

The good thing about being a ghost, he thinks, is that he’s beyond the realms of earth’s laws and logic; he understands her Japanese perfectly, though he’s not entirely certain how _she_ understands _him_. Perhaps, he thinks, she hears him in Japanese, some ghostly goings-on translating him between his lips and her ears. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Death leaves you a lot of time to ponder, he’s found.

‘I get ya,’ he nods, and they set up a game.

She wins, because she always wins any game they play. Del is not _bad_ at video games, not the way Murdoc is, because he’d had extended family and he’d had friends with families, and he’s played games most of his life – unlife? He’s not sure where things end and begin any more – but Noodle is beyond all of those gaming skills he’s built up.

Laughing, she eventually puts her controller down, because it’s not fair on Del to keep beating him like this. He’s sure she doesn’t suspect for a second that he might be letting her win, because he certainly doesn’t suspect that he’s letting her win. He was genuinely trying those last five times, but he just couldn’t seem to get that one hairpin bend right.

‘Aren’t you sleepy yet, kiddo?’ he asks, and she shakes her head.

‘No,’ she sighs, and flops onto her back, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. A groan from Russel has Del shiver, but he doesn’t disappear.

For a minute or so, they sit and lay about in silence, the room silent but for the boys’ snoring. Del gets up to hover over Murdoc and 2D, and he glances back at Noodle.

‘Leave them alone,’ Noodle hums, watching him from the corner of her eye. ‘They’ll know someone’s touching them.’

He hums, and reaches out, hand barely touching Murdoc before the bassist’s still-bloody hand is whipping out and smacking Del’s away. It goes straight through, but the point stands. With a thump, Murdoc’s hand hits the carpet, and he starts snoring again.

‘See?’ Noodle snorts. ‘I keep trying, but I can’t do it.’

 Huffing, Del flops onto the floor next to her, legs draped over her belly. She groans as if pained, but Del weighs nothing, being a ghost.

‘Well, what do you suggest we do, eh?’ he asks. ‘If you ain’t sleepy yet.’

She purses her lips, and lazily draws patterns in the lights on the ceiling, segmented and blurry from the blinds.

‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘What’s good?’

He hums a little, filters through Russel’s memories for what they’d done today.

‘You didn’t practice my songs,’ he says, and she nods.

‘We didn’t want to make Russel more sad,’ she says, ‘he’s been sad.’

Del traces Russel’s veins, tracks thoughts back to him, to Del and the drive-by and the cartoon calendar mentally ticking the days down in a montage of torn paper.

‘Oh,’ he says, and sighs a little. ‘I get it. Yeah. He’d be sad about that.’

Noodle hums, questioning, so he tells her that they’re getting close to the anniversary of his death.

‘That’s sad,’ she says, and he nods.

‘Very sad.’

Being that he can’t communicate with him – he’s tried, he tries _so_ hard, jumping in between seconds of his dreams, and sometimes he thinks that they’re _there_ , that he’s cracked the code and made contact and _gets him_ but then Russel is booting him out, rolling over or jerking awake – Del can’t help Russel through the grief. Oh, Russel knows he’s there, and maybe that’s worse. Knowing that he’s there on the other side of the veil and only contactable by the others, it must hurt. More than once, given that they know Del can be caught on video, and on camera, having been seen in the footage on the cameras more than once, they’ve considered doing a little video diary or something. A message, for Russel to see, addressed to him alone. But Del is reluctant.

It would hurt him more, he thinks. He’d seen Del’s body enough in the car, in the hospital, the morgue. He’d seen the bullet holes and the blood and the paperwork. He’d touched the tears in the fabric of his jersey, the cold slab his body had been presented on, the most morbid present for his soulmate, he’d smelt the stench of death and sterilisation. Del does not want to remind him of all of that. Russ does his best to block the sensations out, the sights and sounds and smells, tries his best to bury it all where he can’t feel it anymore. 

Del doesn’t want to hurt him with all that, but he has no idea of how to tell Noodle any of this, how to explain that what happened that night was absolutely _fucked_. Does a ten-year-old understand drive-by shootings? Did he understand, at that age, about gang warfare and the grim reaper coming for you no matter what?

He doesn’t remember.

Instead, he says, ‘what if I taught you to rap?’

She blinks over at him; she’d been thinking too, about something else, sad memories she doesn’t remember. She frowns a little, and he does his best to smile.

‘You look awful,’ she tells him, and he looks at his hands.

The bloodstains are seeping in again, holes peppering the side of him, from head to rib, arm and wrist and hand. One of the bullets had gone straight through his palm, some kind of twisted stigmata. Del is not particularly religious, raised in Sunday school but not particularly buying into all that God stuff, preferring the safety of music, and his brothers, and then _Russel_ over all that. All of that was tangible, touchable, real, there before his eyes and the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. God could be more beautiful still, but how would he know if he’d never seen it?

(But then, there is the way Murdoc looks at Noodle sometimes, taken aback and blinded, and Del thinks that that must be what it feels like.)

‘Ah,’ he says, and they both look at Russel, who seems more troubled than he had five minutes ago. Perhaps he’s able to feel Del’s thoughts.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Russel slowly relaxes, and Del smiles, body shivering and flickering before settling back to the smooth, blue-static ghost he prefers to be.

‘So how about it?’ he asks, because she never answered him.

‘Rap?’ she asks, and considers it. ‘2D is bad at rap.’

Del frowns at her.

‘There is a song,’ she says, ‘ _Punk_. I do not understand him at all. There’s clapping.’

He had not paid that much attention to the practice, and he uses what she’s told him to filter through Russel’s memories for the hundredth time to find a memory of the song.

‘Oh dear,’ he says, when he has listened to it in its entirety. ‘Oh, that’s not good at all, no I can’t have that.’

She laughs, and sits up, apparently unconcerned that one of his knees is now lodged in her diaphragm.

‘Who is good at rap?’ she asks. ‘But not you.’

He considers it, and she can’t make out names within the static and echo and reverberation of his voice as he mumbles, but then he counts off names on his fingers, names she thinks she’s heard, names she doesn’t know at all.

‘Mos Def, Tupac, Christ girl you’re asking the hard questions here, De La Soul. Nas? Ice Cube is really good. I don’t know, don’t ask me that shit.’

She laughs at him, tells him that she doesn’t know any of them, and he makes her promise to listen to the first three at the least.

She promises, and then tells him to teach her to rap.

It’s hard going; Noodle is not very good with English, never mind heavily accented slang. But she tries, and Del goes slow, goes through the words for his songs with her, slowly building the speed until she’s got the rhythm. The sun is coming up over the horizon fully now, blind-slotted lines cutting across Murdoc’s face and making him grumble. 2D buries his face deeper into Murdoc’s shoulder, and Russel turns his head further into the wing of the chair. They pause to watch them, and then Del looks at Noodle. Her eyelids are heavy, body leaning slightly.

He herds her to the armchair, pushes her up into Russel’s lap, drags a blanket over her.

She beams up at him, and he beams back.

It takes maybe a couple of minutes for her to fall asleep, and as he sits watch, waiting for someone to stir, he thinks he sees her mouthing the words.

(Years and years pass, and Noodle hears rap from the early nineties on the radio. She barely remembers the words, but she keeps up with it, and wonders if Del would be proud of her.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Rock the House.  
> \- So I don’t know shit about rap I will be the first to admit, I appreciate it on a peripheral level, but I don’t know anything about it, so I ended up on everybody’s favourite reading Wikipedia articles, and Ice Cube is IRL Del’s cousin and helped him release his first album, that is hella rad. Mos Def and De La Soul have been on albums, so obviously they go on the list.  
> \- I feel like Del is normal looking until he or Russ wavers and then the signs of death start creeping in and he looks more like a traditional ghost or haunting.  
> \- I love Del tbh, far more than I thought I would. But I love ghosts so that wasn’t a surprise ha.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	11. Not his Muscles, but Percussion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After talking (shouting) 2D into taking Noodle out for the weekend to visit his parents, Murdoc and Russel get to work. [Phase 1]

2D is dithering, and it’s making Murdoc want to slap him. Not punch, because punching is too extreme. Just. Just a slap. On the cheek. And then possibly one on the other too, for good measure. Maybe even with a fish. He’s sure they have some in the fridge. It’s probably terribly out of date, but that’s even better. Nothing like getting slapped with a wet kipper to make you stop dithering.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ 2D asks for the twenty-third time.

Murdoc knows this for a fact, because he’s been counting.

‘This is the twenty-third time you’ve asked me that,’ he says, and can hear 2D shuffling behind him as he hefts another box out of the way to find the still-elusive screwdriver. ‘And I am just as convinced that it’s a good idea as I was the first twenty-two times, if not more so. I need her _out of the house_ , Stu. I need her off of the premises. And no offence to that pert arse of yours, but I need muscle here with me, and you do not have any.’

 2D takes a moment to process this, and Murdoc hauls himself over a stack of boxes to get at the toolbox he can just about see behind a second stack. Stretching, because he is a man, and men are notoriously stupid when it comes to doing things sensibly, he hangs over the boxes to grab at the toolbox, neither foot touching the floor and most of his weight on the wrong side.

For a second, it looks like he’s about to topple and most likely break his neck, but 2D grabs his belt and hauls him back.

‘Is my arse really pert?’ he asks, as Murdoc straightens himself out, dumping the toolbox on top of a crate and yanking his shirt straight.

‘Yes, now go find her and get her out of here already,’ Murdoc says as he pops the clasps holding the box shut and begins rooting in the box, waving a hand. ‘Go on, fuck off.’

2D ignores him, or doesn’t hear him, or just plain old doesn’t consider being told to fuck off as an actual instruction, and reaches into the toolbox to poke at a monkey wrench.

‘Where did you get all this stuff?’ he asks, as though there is about to be any other answer coming out of Murdoc’s mouth.

‘I nicked it,’ he says.

2D looks at him. ‘ _Uncle Norm’s_ I can understand,’ he says, quiet. ‘But _tools_?’

‘I used to work in the building trade,’ Murdoc grunts, and raps 2D’s knuckles with a rat-tail file he’s sure he won’t need. ‘Back in my twenties. Labouring. DIY, that kind of shit, y’know? Took all the tools when I left.’

2D is sure that’s illegal, but alright.

‘I don’t remember seeing them before,’ he says and rubs at his knuckles, where there is a graze from the drag of the file. ‘Where’d you keep them?’

Murdoc’s expression is flat, dark. Approaching genuine frustration. 2D flinches and backs out of his arm’s reach. Though it won’t stop him throwing tools, and this seems to occur to him a second later and he stumbles over his undone laces as he hurries for the door.

‘I’ll go check on Noods!’ he says, in that over-helpful tone Murdoc vaguely remembers hearing that day in the shop, when he’d gone to check on the boy’s rehab. ‘See if she’s ready to go yet, yeah?’

 ‘That would be a good idea, yes. Off you trot.’

Once he’s gone, footfall audible all the way down the corridor, Murdoc rolls his eyes heavenward and starts pulling the tools the instructions in his back pocket say he needs.

Noodle comes in to say goodbye to him, because they’re going to be gone all weekend. She seems surprised to find him in boots she didn’t know he owned because he’s never worn anything other than his Cuban heels, and he’s got a toolbelt slung low and weighted about his hips. Suspicious, she asks what he’s up to, but he just chucks her chin with a finger.

 ‘Go have fun,’ he says, ‘Stu’s folks are nice, yeah? Just don’t do no karate kicks.’

She frowns up at him, and reaches.

He hugs her and laughs when she squeezes hard enough to make him wheeze.

‘You’re just going for the weekend,’ he chuckles, and lets her press a sloppy kiss to the battered bridge of his nose. ‘You’re not going forever.’

‘Forever,’ she mumbles.

‘Never,’ he replies, and that seems to content her enough to rush off to 2D, who is calling her from downstairs.

Murdoc waits until he hears them go, front door slamming – 2D absolutely cannot be allowed to drive, so they’re getting a taxi to the station at Chelmsford to take them down to Crawley. Noodle has never been on a train before, and Murdoc and Russel had had to spend almost three hours – longer than the bloody journey – helping her and 2D understand _exactly_ where they had to go. Neither of them have made the journey themselves, or been to Chelmsford at all, and had had to do a lot of looking at maps and train times and plans of stations to find out what the fuck was going on. When all that was done, and a route was written in Russel’s careful script, he made them both packed lunches, and made sure they had their tickets safely tucked away in 2D’s wallet.

Now Murdoc leans out of the window to make absolutely sure they’re both in the taxi and on their way. He can just about see the black cab beyond the boundary wall, and he grins to himself.

‘Finally!’ he crows, and heads for the door.

 Russel meets him on the landing next to Noodle’s door, with an A4 piece of paper with 2D’s marker pen scrawl of her name, and her neater, but equally scrawled letters.

‘They gone?’ Russel asks, and Murdoc nods, jiggles the handle to the door and grins when it pops open. ‘Did you honestly think it was locked?’

He shrugs. ‘D’s door is always locked.’

Russel murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like, “I wonder why,” but instead he says, when Murdoc asks him to repeat himself, ‘she’s ten, she doesn’t need a lock on her door.’

‘All these rooms up here have locks,’ Murdoc says with another shrug and goes in to start piling all of the cuddly toys and other bed-covering _crap_ that Noodle has accumulated into a plastic storage crate. ‘My door kept sticking for a couple of months until I found that WD40 in the cupboard.’

Russel helps him strip Noodle’s bed and get the mattress and frame into one of the empty rooms, dusted and aerated ready.

It doesn’t take long to get the few basic things that they’d got for her out of the way and her room stripped bare. Flat-pack furniture to go straight in the landfill outside, or else just clutter up that empty room, cheap stuff they’d bought the day after she arrived, because unlike Murdoc and 2D, and Russel when they’d been convinced he wasn’t going to run off and never return and let him out of the building to go and get his shit, she’d come with just her guitar and a change of clothes.

‘Right,’ Murdoc says, and pulls a plan from his back pocket, spreading it out on the wall and holding it. ‘Let’s work out the order of affairs here, so we know what we’re doing.’

They argue about what needs doing first like they’re arguing the price of fish, and eventually Murdoc talks him into the wall being done first.

‘There’s no point even _starting_ anything else,’ he says, as if he can’t believe Russel is suggesting anything else. ‘We have to get that wall down and the doors in before we can even think about doing the rest.’

Russel considers this, because he’d been lobbying for doing the bathroom first.

‘Yeah,’ he agrees, ‘yeah, I guess that makes more sense.’ 

‘It’s the biggest job,’ Murdoc says with a nod, folding the plans up and going to the far wall. There are marks where Noodle had blu-tacked posters and he thumbs them idly. ‘God, this plastering is shite, eh? Right, well. We need to be careful, yeah? No use bringing the whole place down. This ain’t a load-bearing wall, so we should be okay knocking it through.’

‘Are we gonna get this done in two days?’ Russel asks.

‘Well, technically it’s three, if they come home late on Sunday. But either way, we don’t have a choice,’ Murdoc grunts and raps his knuckles against the wall, trying to find a weak spot. ‘If I have to, I can call 2D and make him have a nervous breakdown, that’ll delay them some.’

Russel gives him a flat look.

‘Alright, I’ll tell him to fake one, it’ll still be as effective. His mum’s a worrier. Have you met his mum? Best rack I’ve seen in years.’

Russel smacks him upside the head and leaves to find the sledgehammer.

 It takes them a couple of hours of hard going to get the wall down, and whilst Murdoc starts fiddling with the corners, trying to pretty it up, Russel goes to make them a drink. Murdoc would rather have a can, because Murdoc would always rather have a can, but admits handling a drill whilst _a little merry_ is probably not the best idea he’s ever had.

‘Did that once, though,’ he says, perching on the windowsill, arms bent to let the breeze coming through brush over him. ‘Took out an entire block’s power when I drilled through the wrong wall.’

‘The fact that you were allowed anywhere near a building site amazes me to this day,’ Russel tells him, and downs the last of his coffee to start hauling the drywall up. ‘How are we going to get rid of all this?’

Murdoc looks out of the window; its a pretty empty patch of bugger all down there.

‘Out the window,’ he says, and downs his tea, thunks the mug onto the shelf next to Russel’s, and goes to help haul the chunks of wall to the window. ‘Just chuck all of it out there, it’ll be easier to dump it on the landfill from outside, rather than drag it through the building.

It takes longer for them to get the worst of it, and they agree to leave the dust and minor debris until they get the floor up.

They spend the rest of the afternoon sanding the wall and getting the frame for the sliding door panels in. How Noodle didn’t see them arrive, neither of them are entirely sure, but miss them she did, and that’s fine by them.

Once that’s done, the rest of the evening is spent with Murdoc up on a ladder redoing the lights, and electrocuting himself twice. He shakes the sparks out of his fingers and carries on, much to Russel’s dumfounded stare.

‘How?’ he asks once, and Murdoc doesn’t have a reply beyond idle shrugging.

Whilst Murdoc’s busy with the electrics, Russel gets to work on painting the walls. They only really have to replace the floor after this, so they might as well get the basecoat of paint on whilst there’s little else to do.

They call it a night when Murdoc falls off the ladder and almost breaks a hip. Russel, laughing at him the entire way, drags him to his bedroom to sleep it off with a few of 2D’s painkillers.

 In the morning, Russel sees Murdoc stagger in the direction of the bathroom in his underwear, black and blue and purple down one side and he limps like he’s had a rather, ahem, busy night. Nodding to himself, he heads to the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

‘Not a fucking word,’ Murdoc groans as he lowers himself into the chair at the kitchen table, dressed and ready for the day, but looking like he’s in agony. ‘You do not tell them I fell off the ladder, you absolutely do not. I will smash your face in.’

Russel looks at him, spatula in hand. ‘You want this bacon or not?’ he asks.

Murdoc grumbles that he wants the bacon.

Sandwich and tea dumped on the table in front of him, Murdoc grunts a thanks, and then stops.

‘Fuck me,’ he says, and laughs.

‘What?’ Russel asks, frowning. Murdoc seems genuinely happy, and that’s always worrisome.

‘Nothing,’ he assures his drummer. ‘Nothing. Just – flashbacks to labouring, is all. Tea and bacon butties, ha!’

He shakes his head and almost succeeds in shoving half of his sandwich in his mouth in one go. Almost, but not even Murdoc’s mouth is that big.

Breakfast eaten and the washing up done, they return to Noodle’s bedroom to start prying the floorboards up.

‘Shit,’ Murdoc says as they reach the halfway point, roughly where Noodle’s bed was positioned. They’ve already found two hands and a dozen dead rodents. ‘I hope we don’t find any hidden shit of hers.’

Russel has to take a moment to hack up a lung over this, and then he says, ‘she’s only ten. She’s not old enough for any of that yet. She doesn’t have any money. She doesn’t – we won’t find anything.’

But they’re both now a little more hesitant to pull up the floorboards. What they think they’ll find, they’re not sure, but hesitant they are. In the end, they find a stash of Murdoc’s cigarettes that he’d convinced himself he’d already smoked, and a collection of bottle caps in a carrier bag. Deciding to take a break, they retreat to the kitchen for tea.

‘Are those from us?’ Russel asks, and Murdoc examines the caps whilst Russel looks for clean mugs.

Murdoc sniffs at the cap in his hand, and then tentatively licks it.

‘Oh fuck off,’ he grunts and tosses it on the table. ‘They’re ours. That’s from that shit ‘Dents drinks. Fucking _Stella_ or whatever. Absolute trash.’

 Russel is tempted to remind him that he drinks Strongbow and that in no way makes him a better man. All three of them drink the cheapest brand beer they can get their hands on, and he looks at the pile of caps on the table between them.

‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ he says, quiet. ‘That there’s that many, or that we buy cans more.’

Murdoc gets a look on his face like he’s trodden in dog shit, and rubs his face.

‘Bollocks to it,’ he says, helpfully. ‘Bottles only from now on. Or cans only. One or the other. We won’t have both.’

Russel gives it a week. (Murdoc lasts almost a solid month.)

They have a light lunch of more bacon and a round of chips, because Murdoc wanted chips, and Russel is in no mood to argue. Besides, he likes chips as much as the next man.

Floorboards up, they clear out the space between the joists. Or rather, Russel lets Murdoc, who has no qualms about picking up dead rats and rotting hands with his bare hands and throwing them out of the window with idle chatter about bones and taxidermy and jokes about scores, do it whilst he supervises.

‘I think she’ll like it,’ Russel says as Murdoc curses up a storm about a rat that fell apart as he picked it up.

‘What? A rat corpse on the floor?’

‘I was talking about those mats. What’re they called? Too-tomi or something?’

‘Tatami,’ Murdoc replies, and finally gets the rat bits under control and out of the window. ‘I think that’s the last of them, we just need to clear it all up, I’ll check the electrics and pipes are intact, and then we’ll put the fresh boards down.’

Russel has been watching Murdoc build this project up for the last two months, slowly sneaking new parts in without Noodle’s noticing, drawing up designs and plans and doing a _proper_ job of it. It’s a stark change from the man he was when Russel first arrived; he didn’t kidnap Noodle, for a start. But regardless of her dubious legality, and peculiar entrance to their lives, Murdoc has been doing his damnedest to get the studio in full working order. Make it a liveable place.

‘I’ll get the vacuum cleaner,’ Russel says, and Murdoc nods, already crouching over the joists to fiddle with the piping. Russel just hopes he doesn’t burst it like he did that one in the car park.

When he returns a minute or so later, the room isn’t flooded or wavering with gas, so Russel considers the piping a success, and gets to work getting all the debris out of the joists, leaving the place clean and tidy and new-looking.

It takes much longer to put the floorboards down then it did to pull them up, but Russel supposes this is because Murdoc’s hip is killing him, and he’s losing the ability to bend. He stands on the boards to hold them in place whilst Russel hammers them into place, and by tea-time, they’ve got the floorboards back with very little damage to the walls and themselves.

Downing another handful of painkillers, they order in, and sit watching funny clip shows before dragging themselves upstairs and back into Noodle’s room. Murdoc, limping a little again, fishes out a printout of an article about tatami mats from his toolbelt, and they waste almost half an hour arguing about how to put the mats in. But they agree eventually on the most standard formation for a room this size and get to work putting them down and nailing them into place.

‘I’m pretty sure you don’t nail them down,’ Russel says, but Murdoc glares at him until he shrugs and turns his attention back to the article.

They finish up the floor, throw down a dust sheet, and apply another coat of paint to the walls, in the neutral shade this time. The red paint still sits on the windowsill waiting for everything else to be done.

‘What’s left?’ Russel asks.

‘The sliding panels, and the rest of the paint. And the furniture. We can probably get all that put together tonight, right? Put the furniture together while we wait for the paint. Then put the doors in. Do the bathroom tomorrow. Won’t take long.’

Russel has seen bathroom renovations take _weeks_ , and highly doubts that they will be done by the time 2D and Noodle get back. But Murdoc looks like he has a plan.

They get the panels in by sundown, and the red paint goes on as the last thing. Rather than go to bed, though, they start building up the new furniture for their girl, proper stuff rather than the plywood they’d bought as a hold-over.

Murdoc had been so convinced that their fame was coming that he refused to allow any expenses beyond what was necessary because why waste the money when they were getting better things later on?

Dresser, bed and wardrobe fully assembled and waiting to go in first thing in the morning, they call it a night.

When Russel wakes, it’s to the out-of-tune warbling of one Murdoc Niccals, who is happily smashing the old bathtub to pieces with a wrench.

‘I worry about you,’ Russel says by way of greeting, and Murdoc tells him to either fuck off or help him out.

Russel almost fucks off.

2D rings at lunchtime to tell them that they’re going to have lunch with his parents before heading back.

‘No,’ Murdoc says, looking at the devastation and not-at-all-nearly-ready bathroom he and Russel have been _destroying_ over the course of the morning. ‘No, you need to stay longer. Come back tomorrow.’

‘What? But I thought it was just - ’

‘Fake a migraine, you dimwit,’ Murdoc tells him, cutting him off before he can blow it. ‘You need to stay until tomorrow morning, we’ll be done then.’

‘But our tickets.’

‘For fuck sake, I’ll give you the money for it, it’s not like you don’t have any, fuck me. Just fake it. Hell, I’ll give you a real one if that’ll help; I learnt the words to _Don’t You Want Me_ the other day.’

‘I can manage!’ 2D assures him, sounding very worried indeed.

Murdoc’s grin is too smug for what he suggested, but Russel doesn’t comment, brushing the last shards of broken toilet into the pan before dumping it in the black bag.

‘I'm sure you can, Stu, old buddy, old pal,’ Murdoc coos, and he can almost hear 2D blushing on the other end of the phone. Poor thing. ‘Tomorrow. No sooner, got it?’

‘Tomorrow,’ the boy sighs, and there’s static; he’s nodded, Murdoc guesses. ‘Alright, I’ll see you. Say hi to Russ for us!’

He hangs without doing such a thing.

‘Tomorrow,’ he says instead. ‘That’s plenty of time. All we really gotta do is put a fresh lick of paint, the new lino and then plug everything in.’

‘And build the shower.’

‘Piece of piss.’

And it is; Murdoc had apparently spent a lot of his time as a labourer working in the plumbing sector, because he has everything fitted and sealed in what seems like no time at all.

The tiling on the walls takes the most time, and the adhesive is streaked with blood by the end.

‘I warned you,’ Russel says, and Murdoc, running his adhesive-covered, bleeding hands under the tap and scrubbing vigorously with Solopol to get all the shit off. ‘I told you to slow down, but no, you never listen.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Murdoc grunts, and uncovers another scratch. ‘I got it done, didn’t I? ‘Sides, we gotta put the grout on, and I won’t bleed on that. Sparkling white, see?’

Russel gives him a look that goes ignored, and deliberately flushes the toilet to make the water freeze.

Murdoc’s phone rings from his back pocket, late in the afternoon as they’re finishing up getting the shower put into place, Murdoc sprawled across the floor with his hands under the base to get at the pipes,

‘Get that, would you?’

Russel does his best to not actually touch Murdoc, knowing full well he’ll get a week of gay jokes, but Murdoc doesn’t seem to give the slightest care, too busy arguing with the pipes he can just barely see.

‘Noodle,’ Russel says, and Murdoc grunts.

‘Best answer it then, eh? Probably telling us 2D’s got a migraine.’

He’s not wrong. Noodle sounds very apologetic, and says that they won’t be home tonight.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, baby girl,’ Russel says, sounding very genuine indeed. ‘You take care of 2D for us, though, yeah? Make sure he’s alright to come home.’

He glances at Murdoc, who is red in the face and his shoulders are shaking from the exertion of the uncomfortable position he’s in.

‘If you don’t think he’s up to travelling, don’t let him, though. Make sure he’s alright before you travel.’

Noodle assures him she will, and Murdoc crows with laughter as the pipes finally slot into place.

‘Russ?’ Noodle asks, suspicious. ‘Why didn’t Muds answer?’

‘Ah, he’s got his hands full. We had a burst pipe in the bathroom.’

Not exactly a lie.

Murdoc is now lying face-first on the floor, shaking with laughter, gleeful, over-tired laughter that makes him wheeze. Russel worries about him.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’m gonna have to hang up, okay? Muds needs a hand.’

Or a paper bag, he’s not sure.

‘These pipes,’ Murdoc is wheezing when Russel shoves his phone back into his pocket and helps him to his feet. ‘Never again. Never. You’re doing your own bathrooms, you fuckers.’

Russel had never even considered getting his bathroom renovated, but he’s certainly not letting Murdoc be involved at all. He’s done an incredible job with very little help from Russel; as much as it pains him to admit it, Russel has mostly just been holding heavy things for him and occasionally taking over on things like tiling and laying the floor whilst Murdoc stops for a cigarette or a piss. But that does not mean he wants to go through this again. He’s hiring people next time.

It’s late in the evening when they get the grout on and leave the bathroom to settle, going back to the bedroom to get the place tidied up and clean before bringing the furniture in, everything put back in its place.

‘There,’ Murdoc says, surveying their work. They are both aching like hell, but it’s been worth it, he thinks. The room looks incredible. ‘Just one last thing to do.’

Russel hums, and Murdoc, bruised and stiff and in dire need of a drink, goes limping off to return with a decal, which he sticks to the door. The letters for Noodle’s name, printed large and proud on her door, not a letter of English in sight.

2D calls Murdoc in the middle of the night, sounding very hush-hush and there’s an owl hooting somewhere close by. After being assured that they’re mostly done, it’s just cosmetic work now, 2D assures him they’ll be home by tomorrow evening. And they are, which is nice.

They’re exhausted, bruised and cut and aching all over, but they let no hint of it slip. Murdoc even manages to spin a yarn a mile long about the supposed burst pipe, and Noodle is none-the-wiser. Noodle babbles for most of the evening, telling Russel and Murdoc all about 2D’s parents, and they sit patiently, listening to her talk and stammer and struggle her way through the weekend.

‘Told you you’d enjoy it,’ Murdoc says, smug.

Eventually, her eyelids begin dragging, and she goes upstairs to bed. Her shrieks almost bring the house down. 2D panics, but Murdoc and Russel laugh as she comes barrelling down, still shrieking.

There are tears in her eyes, but she’s laughing too, and punches them both in the arm before covering them in kisses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Clint Eastwood.  
> \- This is not at all what I expected it to be, but there we have it folks.  
> \- It would be entirely possible to do her bedroom up in a couple of days, so long as they didn’t lolly-gag.  
> \- According to Wikipedia, there is a specific layout for tatami mats depending on the room and function and stuff. I bet that was a fun argument that I’ll never write.   
> \- The song Murdoc threatens to sing is by the Human League, Stu’s favourite band.  
> \- Solopol is an industrial cleaner designed to get stuff like paint and grout and that off your skin.  
> \- Man this was a long one, I’m sorry friends. It’s probably got typos, so if there’s anything super awful, let me know.  
> \- I love all you guys, you make my day any time I get a review, god bless.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	12. Blew a Bad Man Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murdoc and Russel agree on only a few things; one of those things is how to deal with paparazzi. [Phase 1]

Murdoc hits the numbers so fast that Russel stands there in awe. He’s not sure what shocks him most; the fact that Murdoc remembers 2D’s number well enough to punch it on at the speed he does, or that _he_ recognises 2D’s number that quickly. Murdoc looks every bit the TV criminal stood there with his bloody nose and bruising cheek, arm braced against the unit and holding the phone to his ear with a very put-upon look on his battered face. He looks older than Russel has ever seen him look, sunburnt and bloody and so very tired.

‘Listen, dentface,’ Murdoc snarls by way of greeting, ‘you need to get down to the station and get me and Russ out of here.’

Stood a few feet away, Russel can hear Noodle’s tinny screeching of “ _Station? Station? What!_ ” as clear as day.

Wincing, Murdoc’s tone changes, his body language and expression turning contrite, soft, with embarrassment flushing his ears.

‘Love,’ he groans, and leans his brow against the unit, hand going to his hair. ‘Put Stu on, yeah?  I need to talk to – what do you mean he’s asleep? What? No, I don’t care – well he needs to get a grip then, don’t he? What? No, slow down, pet, you’re starting to go Japanese again – look, I don’t give a shit if he’s dying, put him on – pet – Noodle, for fuck sake. Just – ah, finally. Listen, Stuart, me and Russ need bail.’

Watching Murdoc slowly tense like a wound spring is fascinating. He’s trying to keep calm, but it’s hard not to snap at the boy, and Russel appreciates that it takes a lot of patience to deal with him when he’s just woken up.

‘Yeah, well,’ Murdoc is sighing, ‘what else did you expect me to do? Some creepy shit starts taking photos of a ten-year-old girl in a swimsuit, you think I’m taking that shit? I ain’t having no paedophilia going on in my – I broke his nose, what did you think I was going to do? I was advocating running him over with the Geep but Russ wouldn’t let me. Wouldn’t let me do it with the Corvette either. Miserable law-abiding bellend.’

Russel had only said not to run him over because he wasn’t sure they could get off on murder. Murdoc has incredible luck with the law regarding breaking people’s faces, and they’ve been lucky to be able to get off on bail. They need 2D to pay said bail, but they’re otherwise free.

‘I know you don’t,’ Murdoc sighs. ‘You’ll have to get a taxi, since you’ll have to – well, yeah, you can’t leave her by herself – what? Eh? Manson? What _about_ that freak? “He might show up?” Don’t be daft, he’ll know I’m here by now. You’ll probably see him trying to climb in a window or something. Fucking prat. As long as she’s safe, I don’t give a fuck about you – yeah, yeah, it’s a cruel fact of life. Now hurry your arse up, will you? I’m gasping for a cuppa here and they won’t let me have hot water.’

Russel is not in the least surprised; Murdoc does not have a very trustworthy face, and his behaviour, considering they are currently in a holding cell, does not endear him much either.

Murdoc hangs up with a last grunt, and rubs his face with a hand, dislodging the clotting blood and starting his nosebleed again. Smearing it across his already-filthy cheek with a swipe of his fingers, he takes a breath and strolls back to Russel.

‘Well, that’s that sorted,’ he hums, pleased with himself, ‘they shouldn’t be long.’

**\+ + + + +**

Noodle is the first through the door an hour later, kicking it open and screaming their names as loud as she can. For such a tiny thing, she has a set of lungs on her, which Murdoc is incredibly pleased about, because it means they can hear her no matter where she is, and she can hold notes like the best. She can’t get through the gate to the cell, no matter how hard she yanks at the bars, and the officer doesn’t know what to do with her, having chased her through from the foyer. How she knew where to go remains a mystery, but find her way she did. Murdoc had been lounging on the bunk, content to let all this ruckus carry on without him, but sits up to assure Noodle he’s fine at the repeated calls of his name.

‘Blood!’ she crows as soon as she claps eyes on his face. ‘Blood!’

‘Let her in,’ Russel says with a roll of his eyes, because she’s clawing at the lock, feet up on the bars. ‘She’ll just break it down otherwise.’

As soon as the gate is open, she leaps into Russel’s waiting arms and kisses all over his face before using him as a springboard to leap into Murdoc’s lap. The bassist’s breath leaves him all at once and he collapses, but allows her to follow him down, sprawling over him and showering him with kisses too, her fingers prodding at his cheeks and rubbing blood from his face with a spit-slick thumb. Russel grins, and Murdoc’s fingers stick up behind Noodle’s back, safely out of her line of sight.

‘Alright,’ he laughs, but his attempts to peel her off are futile, her grip limpet-like. ‘That’s enough, love.’

2D appears in the doorway, looking concerned and amused at once. Murdoc flips him off too and 2D’s lips purse, eyebrows knotting.

‘You took your time,’ Murdoc snorts. ‘Are we bailed?’

The singer nods. ‘Yeah, it was quite cheap, you know? Guess you didn’t cause no serious harm or nothing.’

‘Shame,’ Murdoc hums, and manages to get Noodle off his lap to get his feet, though she keeps her fingers knotted into a shredded tear in the thigh of his jeans. Russel hums in agreement. Del’s anger thrums through his veins, a heartbeat of _kill him dead_ , but he shakes it away. What’s done is done, and Del won’t help matters by picking it up again.

‘Shall we be off, then?’ Murdoc asks, when no one makes any move to leave the cell, which is now quite crowded with all four of them in what is really a one-man cell. ‘I’ll drive.’

‘Didn’t they say you shouldn’t?’ Russel asks.

‘I didn’t go through any windows. I’m fine. I got punched in the face, it’s hardly worth a concussion.’

2D starts, but doesn’t say anything. Russel watches him fiddle with his fingers as he trails after Murdoc, wonders what he’s thinking. Surely he isn’t worried for Murdoc’s welfare, because God knows everyone gave up on that months ago. Murdoc gave up on his welfare _years_ ago, after all.

Noodle insists on clinging to Murdoc’s leg as they sign the paperwork and leave, but once they’re in the car, she cuddles up to Russel without complaint, letting Murdoc and 2D bicker about the directions back to the house.

2D insists that they have to take a left on First, but Murdoc isn’t having it, insisting they go right.

They’re both wrong; they have to go straight on for another two junctions.

After taking twice as long to get home as they really need to, they eventually – _eventually_ , three wrong turns, one drag race and two sudden pit-stops from Murdoc slamming on the breaks to try and shove 2D’s bullshit directions out of the passenger window and take him with it – reach their house and climb out.

‘Fuck me,’ Murdoc says, stretching. ‘I am _never_ listening to your directions again.’

2D ignores him, loping off inside, and Murdoc rolls his eyes heavenward, follows him in, Noodle hot on his heels. Russel can hear bickering from inside within ten seconds, and laughs as Noodle and 2D both almost run into him in their hurry to get upstairs and out of a most likely irate Murdoc’s way.

Russel finds him in the kitchen, bent over the sink and scrubbing the blood from his face.

‘Hey,’ Russel says, and leans against the counter next to him. ‘What happened today - ’

‘It had to be done,’ Murdoc says, and looks out of the window over the garden. The pool is as they left it; towels and floats and empty cans, Noodle’s poolside games still floating uncompleted in the water. Russel can see Murdoc’s brain ticking over, counting out paces and panels and erecting a fence to block out the paparazzi. ‘I _can’t_ let that shit go, Russ.’

There’s a catch to his voice, like he’s trying to justify himself, justify his actions.

‘I know,’ Russel replies, quiet, emphatic, because he _does_ know, and looks out over the pool too. ‘I was there, remember?’

‘What kind of fucking,’ the bassist starts with a snarl, and then stops, looks at his hands. They’re shaking. Russel wonders what he’s thinking. A drop of water, stained with his blood, trickles down the curve of his mouth, drips from his chin and lands on his back of his hand. ‘I – is this what America is now? Photos of kids in swimsuits?’

‘We deleted them,’ Russel assures him, because there’s a familiar tension in Murdoc’s shoulders, a curl to his lip. It’s the look he gets when people bring up Belphegor, when there’s a story of child abuse on the news.

Murdoc is many things, born from the darkest pits and he dwelled there for thirty years, but he’s crawling his way out now. Russel is not one for poetry, but he imagines, in the vague dreams between Del and waking he gets sometimes, that Murdoc is experiencing the first rays of light on his face, the first touch of heaven under his fingertips. It’s so incredibly sad, but he’s _learning_ and he’s becoming so much _more_. Russel, though he has no need to, no right even, feels proud of him, feels the pride a father would feel. It’s ridiculous and most certainly would not be appreciated, so he keeps it to himself and Del.

‘We deleted them,’ Murdoc echoes, and the white-knuckle grip he’d had on the counter relaxes, and he splashes his face one last time.

‘We couldn’t kill him, though, you understand that, right?’

‘Of course I do, I’m not a fucking idiot, you know,’ Murdoc spits, and pulls the plug to drain the sink before reaching for the towel and for a second he stays there with it pressed to his face, as if collecting himself. After a moment, he pulls it away. ‘Look, I. I’m just.’

But he can’t seem to find the words to describe whatever he’s _just_ , so he just shakes his head and gives his face a last, half-hearted scrub before tossing the towel on the side.

‘We’ll put a fence up,’ he says, which is clearly not what he was planning on saying. ‘And the next creeper that takes a photo of her is going to be eating his meals through a drip.’

The atmosphere is heavy, and Russel feels suffocated. This is what Murdoc is now, he thinks, the darkness swallowing him from the ground up now the terror he denies feeling when he thinks about Noodle, the press and the public and the internet and what they think of a ten-year-old girl living with a man like him. It’s all too clear in the haunted look that hasn’t quite left his face yet, the look that formed when they first spotted the camera flash.

Russel doesn’t have the full story, but Murdoc can occasionally be coaxed into talking about his childhood, about the things that happened to him. He is not a family man by any stretch of the imagination, and likely never will be, but for as much as he professes a hatred of children, Murdoc will not see Noodle hurt. Maybe it’s something in Murdoc, some deal he made, or a path he chose, or maybe it’s Noodle, but he, Russel, thinks that perhaps the light Murdoc sees as he crawls out of the pit is her, the heaven he touches is her hand, safely tucked away in his, helping him drag his sorry arse out of the fire. Sometimes, it’s probably the only thing that keeps him going, no matter what gossip magazines and red-tops say.

But that is all far too much introspection based on dreams he barely remembers, and Noodle is barging in anyway, either oblivious to the thick, morose air between two of her boys, or choosing to ignore it for her peace of mind.

As far as Russel knows, Noodle doesn’t actually know what they were in a holding cell for, just that they’d punched someone in the face and that was that.

Murdoc changes almost instantly, goes from the dull staring at the pool to engaged in barely a second, talking to Noodle as she asks questions of him, telling him fibs about things 2D has said about his guitar, about music.  It makes a smile flit at the corners of his mouth. She knows, Russel thinks, as Noodle’s hand sneaks up, slots into Murdoc’s, fingers fitting perfectly between his, and she begins dragging him away from the window and deeper into the house. She knows something is wrong, and she’s doing what she knows best, distracting him from his demons, regardless of how physical or real they are.

After a moment, a door shuts, and the electric thrum of Murdoc’s half-broken amp begins to worm its way through Russel’s veins, an undercurrent so familiar he almost doesn’t notice it, he glances over at the towel, and then back out at the pool. Upstairs, they’re contending on who can strum a tune faster, and a minute passes before he recognises the bass for _Thriller_ , and he chuckles to himself, Del warming deep beneath his ribs, swelling at a memory Russel doesn’t have. Noodle joins in, and soon 2D is belting out the lyrics as loud as he can from somewhere else in the house. He’s probably dancing (badly) and Noodle starts laughing.

Russel stays in the kitchen, watches a can of _Heineken_ drift over the patio, and then turns to get dinner started, idly tapping the drumbeat out as he moves between fridge and oven and sink. When he shouts them down to eat, Murdoc is looking calmer, his hands steadier. He even manages to make jokes while they eat, though he ends up shoving his plate to Russel to finish off. In the morning, there will be plans for a fence in place, and they’ll find him out there already digging the yard up to get the posts in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from New Genius (Brother).  
> \- I asked an American friend of mine for a cool car, and he gave me the Corvette, so there, that’s Murdoc’s cool car du jour.  
> \- Red-tops are a type of tabloid in Britain, named for red titles; e.g. The Sun and The Daily Mail. They are absolute trash and would delight in digging up sordid details of Murdoc’s past and spinning them waaaaaaay out of context.  
> \- Murdoc is of the right generation to have been a huge Michael Jackson fan in the eighties (he’d have been 20 in ’86), and if you think he doesn’t know how to play Thriller and knows all the dance moves you are 100% wrong. I don’t care how into metal he was in his teens, he would have positively adored everything Thriller is. Just imagine 17-year-old Murdoc in total awe of the video, I'm crying, my son, my child.  
> \- I don’t know if any of the beers the boys drink are readily available in America? But I know Heineken is so they can drink that instead.  
> \- Expect more “Murdoc and Russel react drastically to people getting too personal with an underage Noodle” drama, because this shit is gold.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	13. Thunder Roll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murdoc can’t keep his foot out of his mouth or off the accelerator. [Phase 1]

Russel is doing _something_ that has the other three fleeing the house. It smells and Russel _says_ that it’s edible, but they’d all shared that dubious expression, and had all made for the door the moment Russel saw it. Murdoc had the car started before they’d even got the doors shut, and Noodle slid across the backseat as he swung out of the drive.

Straightening herself up, she asks where they’re going.

‘I don’t know,’ Murdoc admits, because he still doesn’t quite know his way around. ‘Anywhere is better than in _there_.’

2D nods, and winds the window down, sticking his head out to get some fresh air. Murdoc tells him to get back in the car.

‘You aren’t a dog,’ he says, and then adds, when 2D sticks his tongue out like one, ‘I’m the only one allowed to hit you in the face with a car, you’re going to get yourself hurt.’

That startles 2D enough that he gets his head back in safely within the confines of the car.

They drive aimlessly for maybe twenty minutes; Murdoc finds a petrol station and pulls in to refill, and Noodle hurries off to the store to get them all something cold to drink. When they return, 2D is cowering in the car, looking very Threatened.

Murdoc and Noodle share a look. She asks if she can kick the man stood outside the car in the face. For a second, Murdoc actually considers it.

‘No,’ he says with a sigh, ‘best not. I think me an’ Russ being in a cell is enough. Can they even arrest kids?’

He’s pretty sure they can’t, but he doesn’t want to risk it, and approaches with a level expression.

‘Well, I’m not really – I’m not the driver, you see? I just – I’m – ’ 2D is saying when he sees them. Well, Murdoc. Noodle is going around the other side to slip into the car. ‘Ah! Muds!’

Murdoc very deliberately braces himself against the side of the car, handing 2D his flavoured ice slush _thing_ through the window before turning his attention to the man beside him. He’s a big burly chap, the kind that spends all day at the gym and wears vests and backwards caps and thinks they’re the best thing since sliced bread. They make Murdoc sick by default, and he looks him up and down in disgust.

‘Can I help you?’ he asks, and then, looking at the man’s hands, ‘get your hands off my car.’

He’s a few inches shorter than this other guy, who isn’t as tall as 2D, because Murdoc’s not breaking his neck trying to meet his gaze, but a little thing like _height_ never stopped him picking a fight before. Noodle has her hand on 2D’s arm, and Murdoc considers his next move.

‘You’re in my spot,’ the guy says.

‘It’s a fucking petrol station,’ Murdoc says, ‘there isn’t such a thing as a “spot,” don’t be so stupid.’

2D cowers even deeper in his seat.

The man tries, in some super ridiculous attempt to show off, to scratch the roof with his nails as he takes his hands off. All he does is succeed in making himself look like a twat, and make that awful screeching noise.

Murdoc gives him a droll look, and the man seems a little sheepish, almost.

‘Are you done trying to key my car with your nails?’ he asks, and raises an eyebrow, ‘I mean, I can actually give you keys if you’d like, I’m sure they’d do a better job.’

 2D’s fingers curl against his thigh, legs drawing up, and Murdoc knows he’s wincing. He’s deliberately picking a fight now, deliberately prodding the man’s ego.

‘Get out of my space,’ he spits, red in the face and clenching his fists.

It’s like teasing a child, it really is.

‘Nah,’ Murdoc replies with a sniff, and drums his fingers against the roof for a moment as he considers, ‘I’m not done here yet.’

‘What do you have left to do? We got petrol, don’t we?’ 2D asks.

‘Shut up, dentface,’ Murdoc tells him, and 2D shuts up.

The man grabs the front of Murdoc’s shirt and pulls him close. Lip curled, Murdoc looks at his hand, and then drags his eyes up to his face. He looks bored, uninterested, tired.

‘Are you done?’ he asks.

The man snarls, and shoves Murdoc back. It says something about the number of fights Murdoc has picked over the years that he is already moving his foot to brace himself, rocking back onto that leg. His fingers squeak against the roof, but his hand doesn’t leave it.

‘You and me,’ the man snarls, and Murdoc laughs at that, dismissive.

‘Yeah, I’m done,’ he says, throwaway, and strolls with a carefree whistle around to the driver’s side, sliding in and turning the key.

It’s a shame they’re not in the Geep, because he could get some really nice smoke up off the tyres then, but he does his best, and heads out into traffic.

As they wait at a red light, absolutely lost now, Noodle leans through the gap between the front seats. Murdoc’s hands are trembling against the wheel, knuckles white.

‘Are you crazy?’ she asks him.

‘I think so,’ Murdoc replies. ‘Satan, I thought he was going to punch me. I don’t know how many more breaks this nose can take.’

2D looks at it; it’s looking a little worse for wear. ‘Not many,’ he mumbles, and Murdoc gives him a look.

 They don’t get to the lights before they change again, and Murdoc snarls about having to wait twice. 2D tells him that it was like this in London, and Murdoc ignores him.

The car next to them beeps its horn. All three of them look.

‘Oh,’ Murdoc sighs, ‘it’s you again.’

2D shrinks in his seat; he’s closest to the other car. Noodle makes a few rude gestures she knows she can only get away with because she’s with these two and not Russel.

The man from the petrol station revs his engine. Murdoc watches him.

‘Have you two got your seatbelts on?’ he asks.

2D does, but the tell-tale click of Noodle’s says that she hadn’t.

‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asks.

‘Not a clue,’ he replies, but he revs the engine anyway, eyes on the lights.

The road in front of them is clear; they come to the conclusion as the tyres screech and he lets up on the brakes to speed off that they are heading in the opposite direction of home.

‘Thank fuck I got a fast car,’ Murdoc laughs, more giddy than he should be.

They go careening round a corner, and he almost puts the car on two wheels. Instinctively, 2D reaches up to hold onto the handrail by the door, and Murdoc can feel Noodle’s arms against his nape from where she’s hugging his headrest. The other car quickly catches up, and Murdoc hadn’t really looked at it, but it’s a good one, fast. Probably modified.

‘Am I in a drag race?’ he asks, and all four tyres leave the tarmac when they go over a slight incline.

‘Street race,’ Noodle corrects, and laughs that laugh of hers as the other car comes out of nowhere, far too close and making 2D yelp.

The bastard zooms off ahead, and Murdoc sees red.

‘No, you fucking _don’t_ ,’ Murdoc snarls, and yanks the gear stick into sixth.

He has no idea where they’re going, or what the rules really are, but he’s seen enough of this shit on the television in the small hours where the heat and noise and light keeps him awake. He follows the roads, trusts his instincts. He’s been driving for the better part of sixteen years, he knows roads.

At one point, and Murdoc doesn’t dare check the speed dial to know what they’re going, they rocket past the other car and the twat driving it, veering round the bend with a screech of tyres and a cloud of dust. Noodle whoops, and 2D moans, positively green.

He eventually comes to a stop at the next set of red lights, because he’s in no mood to get arrested again, and 2D is slumped in his seat, breathing hard, Noodle behind them far too giggly for her own good. A moment or so passes, and the guy pulls up next to them.

Murdoc sits there smugly and ignores him, and after a moment, Noodle asks if they can drive that fast again. He makes a note to take her off-roading. She’d like that. 2D would hate it, and Russel would, because they’re both misery-guts. He supposes 2D has a reason to hate “dangerous” driving, but that’s his problem. Noodle loves it, and Murdoc loves it, and that’s fine by him.

The lights show no signs of changing, so Murdoc leans past 2D and grins across the space between the cars.

‘So do I win anything for that, or what? Challenging a celebrity to a street race? What a joke! Don’t you know I’m famous for this shit back home?’

2D opens his mouth, but Noodle pinches his arm before he blurts anything embarrassing out. Whining, he rubs the spot and glares over his shoulder at her. Murdoc, not sparing him a glance, pinches the inside of his thigh, hard enough to make his leg jerk.

The man seems flustered, confused that the short, sunburnt, ugly little English prick managed to out-drive him.

‘Murdoc?’ 2D whispers, and points. ‘The lights.’

Murdoc glances up and throws himself back into his seat, back in position to move with the lights. The man, in the other lane to turn right, doesn’t follow.

They turn a bend, and he disappears from view.

‘Right,’ Murdoc says, as they drive along at a steady pace that makes 2D look like he wants to throw up less and less, ‘how do we get back home?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Stylo.  
> \- I have no idea what to say about this to be honest, I just wanted to write Murdoc being allowed to drive a fast car with the babies in the car with him.  
> \- Disclaimer: I don’t know how to drive and know nothing about street racing outside of video games.  
> \- I feel like Noodle would love off-roading, especially with Murdoc driving, he’d be great at that kind of thing.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	14. Some Chemical Load

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It doesn’t matter if it’s the bathroom at Kong or the cramped bathroom in the Radio One building; 2D’s meds cause problems. [Phase 2]

They’re at the BBC’s Radio 1 studio, and they’ve been causing mischief all morning. No one had quite been prepared for them in their full glory; and by full glory, it must be established that it is meant in complete and total irony. There is nothing glorious about the seven-thirty arrival of four of the least morning-capable people in Britain. They try, of course, but 2D’s already exceeded his Recommended Daily Dose (patent pending) of pain medication, Murdoc has the early-morning jitters of having not had time for a fag, and Noodle and Russel are sleep-slow and verging on argumentative.

Knowing themselves as they do, they sequester themselves out of the way next to the vending machines and try to find the happy medium between total exhaustion and coherent pronunciation. Murdoc gives up after the pyramid of empty paper cups reaches four tiers, and lets his accent crawl through Stoke’s gutters, and 2D, already blinking slow and leaning heavily to one side, has deemed himself a lost cause and grumbles to himself when the light hits his sore, migraine-sensitive eyes.

Eventually, as Noodle begins drifting again, falling forward like a kitten with no sense of balance, an intern comes through to tell them they’re up.

As they meander down the corridor, Russel is the most engaged of the four, carefully leading Noodle by the hand and eventually scooping her up when she stumbles a fifth time. She’s far too old really, thirteen now, to be carried around, but it’s better than having her break her neck on a stray corner of carpet or a cable or God-knows-what. Murdoc and 2D dawdle along behind, and Murdoc watches the boy from the corner of his eye, watches the colour drain and the green rise.

The intern says something about live performances, about having instruments set up for them, and they all make dismissive, vaguely-agreeing noises. Murdoc wakes up some as the interview commences, talking total rot as he is wont to do, rambling on and filling the time, but more and more, he’s watching 2D. First from the corner of his eye, and then his head turns to look directly. 2D looks back, and shrugs a little.

So Murdoc carries on, rambling away like a drunk with no audience, until eventually 2D tugs his sleeve. He pauses mid-sentence to look over at him and grunt in question. It might be a word, it’s hard to tell.

‘I’m gonna be sick,’ he says, and Murdoc’s eyes rolls so far upwards they’re nothing but bloodshot sclera for a second.

‘Russ?’ he hums, and kicks his chair back from the microphone. ‘Take this next one for us, would you, mate?’

He pulls his headphones off, jams them on Russel’s head and rounds the desks to find the bin. Whilst Russel attempts to answer the question, Murdoc goes back to 2D, sticks the bin between the singer’s knees and shoves his head down towards it, hiking his jeans to crouch comfortably. His hand runs through the boy’s blue locks, catches them between his fingers to hold it all away from his face.

‘You’re running hot,’ he murmurs, ‘you better not be getting sick.’

2D groans.

Russel manages to steer the conversation back on track, and the interview carries on without them. The interviewer does her best to not stare at the two boys, but it’s hard; she’s heard things, Russel knows, about the way Murdoc behaves, the way he treats 2D, the stories that he’s sure get passed around the media about their general state of existence, and this little scene here? This is not what she’d expected. He’d noticed the conspicuous absence of anything loose and heavy that Murdoc could throw, the soft, comfortable chairs designed to lull all four of them into compliancy, because he _knows_ that tantrum Noodle and 2D threw about the hard plastic chairs is on YouTube somewhere, the steady supply of tea. Radio 1 knew what they were letting themselves in for, and yet here the troublemakers are, crouched in a corner, quiet and out of the way and not causing a fuss.

A few moments pass, 2D’s breath hitching, and then he’s hurling. Russel talks a little louder to try and cover the noise, but the microphones just about pick it up, because being sick has never been a _quiet_ activity, and they pick up Murdoc’s voice too, soft and gentle, like coaxing a cat.

‘There’s a good lad,’ he coos, scratching his nails against 2D’s scalp as the boy splutters and makes pathetic, sickly noises. ‘Get it all up, there we go.’

Noodle, sat the other side of Russel and thereby mostly blocked from getting too close to them, peers around and asks questions that they don’t quite catch, so Murdoc ignores her and 2D continues to throw up.

‘Come on now, dove,’ Murdoc hums, rubs his other hand down the back of 2D’s shirt, blistering heat against the sweat-sick skin, ‘you’ll be better for it.’

When whatever it is 2D did or didn’t eat or what pills he took are completely out of his system and he’s spat the last of the bile out, Murdoc gives him a last ruffle to the hair and takes the bin from him. Raising his free hand to the interviewer in apology, he gestures at the door and hauls 2D up by the arm, shoving him towards it.

‘Uh,’ the interviewer says, ‘Murdoc and 2D are just stepping out for a few minutes, so we’ll get to the live performances when they’re back. In the meantime, let’s – ‘

And the door swings shut behind them, cutting out the rest of her sentence.

Murdoc shoves the bin at the nearest intern and asks for the directions to the toilets. Taking one look at 2D, and the smell of the bin filling the corridor, they’re eager to comply, so Murdoc drags the boy in that direction.

‘Right,’ he says, when the door is safely shut behind them, ‘is it all up?’

‘I think so,’ 2D groans, and leans on the counter, turning the tap on to rinse his mouth out and splash his face. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘You took too many of those fucking pills,’ Murdoc says, as though 2D hasn’t realised this. ‘I keep telling you not to, but you _never_ listen to me. You’re no good to me addled, ‘D. Not that you aren’t addled anyway, but I’d rather you not be frothing at the mouth.’

‘They don’t make me froth,’ 2D offers as a consolation.

‘I was speaking _figuratively_ , you prat. If I still had my soul, I might sell it to get you more than that used receipt for a brain you’ve got.’

2D doesn’t even look offended; paper-brain is a familiar nickname at this point. He thinks he prefers it to face-ache, given that Murdoc often calls him pretty. It’s a mixed-signal. There isn’t much to get confused about with a name like paper-brain.

Murdoc rubs a hand over his face, picking at a stray shred of skin on his lip whilst he waits for his singer to get the taste out of his mouth.

‘Look,’ he says, and extends his hand. His palm is scabbed again, a sure sign that 2D hadn’t noticed before of a deal made somewhere. Maybe to protect Kong against something? 2D isn’t sure. ‘Give me the pills.’

It takes 2D twice as long as normal to get the words processed; he’s far too busy staring at the scabs on Murdoc’s palm.

‘What?’ he asks when the words have sunk in, and then, ‘no?’

Murdoc backs him into the counter, hands on the mirror, pressed so close they’re almost nose-to-nose. It’s times like these, as 2D leans back and Murdoc leans in, that 2D remembers just how _short_ Murdoc is, how tall he himself is. But it doesn’t stop Murdoc’s ego, his boiling, hell-spawn rage from swelling to fill the room, his bristling concern and stubborn, iron-like will tearing at the walls until the world has bowed to him. 2D has always been first to get on his knees, and the lack of acquiescence now is poison in Murdoc’s veins.

‘Give me the pills,’ he snarls, ‘you can’t be fucking trusted.’

‘I don’t trust you!’ 2D yelps back, because he doesn’t. Murdoc is worse at popping pills than he is; at least he knows for sure what he’s taking. Murdoc’ll insist he doesn’t pop pills, because he’s a powder keg in and of himself, but 2D’s seen the dubiously-dubbed medicine cabinet in the camper.

At this outburst, Murdoc looks at him, level, eyebrows down, lip curling. 2D flinches, and tries to get further back, but all he really manages to do is get himself sat on a wet patch on the counter, his feet a few inches off the lino.

‘Is that so?’ Murdoc asks, but it doesn’t really sound like a question. ‘May I remind you that I am a licensed doctor?’

‘May I remind you that those are prescription drugs?’ 2D retorts, but his heart is pounding, his skin shivering, breath coming in short, sharp wheezes.

Murdoc presses closer, can feel 2D’s heart against his own. The back of 2D’s head bumps the mirror; his breath fans across Murdoc’s face, hot and smelling of sick and unfiltered water and half-digested pills. Murdoc’s smells of tea and cigarettes and the after-burn of a deal, and 2D’s stomach churns all over again, making uncomfortable gurgling noises.

‘May I remind you that _I_ write those prescriptions?’ the older man snarls, and his eyes flare, both red for a split, easily-missed second.

It’s like looking into hell, that red eye of his, all flames and screaming sinners. 2D used to be terrified of it, terrified of what it meant, but now he meets it evenly. Murdoc, for all his deals and his demons, is still just a man, and fists are easier to defend against than flames.

‘Give me the pills, Stuart,’ Murdoc says, and his voice is so low, ripping the floor out from beneath them as it drags. ‘I won’t ask again.’

2D scrabbles for something, anything, but Murdoc has him pinned against the counter, and short of spraying them both with water from the tap, or hitting him with a paper towel, there is fuck all he can do.

‘I,’ he starts, and Murdoc’s growl cuts him off. ‘I. I don’t have any on me. Those were the last.’

‘What do you _mean_ ; those were the last? I wrote you a prescription last week.’

2D gives him a shaky, sheepish smile. Murdoc is not impressed or fooled in the least.

‘Stuart,’ he snarls, and then, without missing so much a heartbeat, adds his surname.

And like that, 2D is gone, sagging under him and expression glazing. Names have power, and Murdoc almost never uses his because of the power it holds. Still in that daze, 2D pulls the bottle from his trouser pocket, and Murdoc takes it, backing away before tucking it safely into the inside pocket of his jacket. There aren’t many left, but Murdoc does not need the spectacle of a passed-out, overdosed Stuart Pot on the floor in a radio station.

‘Talk to me next time you want them,’ he says, and 2D nods, head tilted, glassy. ‘Oi, dent-face, listen to me.’

Just as quickly as it had come, the fog is gone, and 2D blinks at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

‘You’re alright,’ Murdoc assures him, ‘just – don’t do that again, yeah? Talk to me.’

But they both know there are too many pill bottles littered around Kong, and too many dark corners that not even the monsters lurking beneath the shadows can reach.

‘I didn’t overdose,’ 2D tells him, and when they lock gazes, Murdoc sees it written all over the boy’s pretty, vacant face; he knows what an overdose is. What an overdose is like. How many he has to take to make one.

‘You ever dare,’ he snarls, and makes to move forward, but the door bangs open, and Russel spreads his hands when they both jump, expressions forced-innocent.

(Murdoc, having had his nose broken no less than five times by Russel’s fist, does not much fancy another fight in a toilet stall, and takes every measure to pacify their hulking drummer, which generally amounts to keeping his hands in his pockets and his smile sycophantic. )

‘Right,’ Russel sighs, in that jaded sort of tone he has these days, ‘well, when you’ve finished fucking about in here, we’re supposed to be playing a set.’

As they hurry after the hulking drummer, they cast each other furtive looks. When Murdoc looks, 2D’s gaze is fixed on the frayed seams of his toecaps, and when 2D glances up from beneath errant hair, Murdoc is glaring at the wall. Russel ignores them both, too used now to their squabbles and sudden silences, and chunters to himself about how they should be _over_ the eel thing, it’s been at least three years now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Some Kind of Nature.  
> \- A pyramid of four tiers would be about 30 cups, depending on how neatly he made it, and 30 cups in about an hour is an achievement, even between four people.  
> \- Murdoc canonically mentions speed and poppers as drugs he’s taken, neither of which are pills. (Poppers at the beginning of Rise of the Ogre, in response to being accused of stinking of whisky at school, and speed during the recording of the Feel Good Inc. video) Fun fact; I know next to nothing about drugs, so you’re never going to get a chapter going into depth about it, you’ll just get vague, probably inaccurate references.  
> \- Names having power is a reference to the idea that you can only control a demon by using its real name. Rumpelstiltskin also applies here.  
> \- The eel is a nod to the G-Bite, of course.   
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	15. They're Mesmerised

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle likes Murdoc best like this. [Phase 1]

Winter is making everyone grumpy, and all any of them want to do is sleep; the ground is frosted over and 2D has already sprained an ankle and given up even attempting to leave Kong. So it means that they’re all getting a bit of cabin fever. Murdoc has the camper to escape to, but there’s no heating in the car park, and as much as he has girls round, he gets cold easily, so he takes to sneaking into 2D’s room to open his curtains and startle the boy into having nightmares so he can leech his warmth.

Noodle thinks this is a great tactic, but she much prefers stealing all of Murdoc’s warmth, because even though he says he feels the cold like he’s – ah, what was it? In the buff in an ice floe? – well, whatever it was, he burns like an open fire, and that’s nice when the heating goes down.

Which it does. All the time.

Russel has gone to bed early and 2D has a _girl_ round, so Noodle is left with little else to do tonight; normally, she’d play video games, but she’s stuck on a boss, and she can’t be doing with all the frustration of an unskippable cutscene. So she crashes and bangs her way down one of the corridors, driving her remote control monkey into the walls until eventually she comes to the conclusion that she might as well go and practice for the album. It’s hard to get time to herself to practice, after all, so it’ll be nice to get in the studio and play without interruption.

But when she gets to the studio, Murdoc is there, replacing a string on one of his spare bass guitars. She’s snapped strings on her Les Paul before, but she’s never had to replace them herself, because Murdoc always does it for her. It occurs to her, as she stands there in the open doorway, staring dumbly, that she’s never actually _watched_ him do it. Which is weird, because she loves her guitar, and loves him, and loves that they share guitars, and why did she never actually watch him change the strings before?

He glances up when the door is held open but there’s no further action, no words tossed into the room in his general direction, and he smiles.

‘Hello, pet,’ he says, and turns his attention back to the guitar in his lap.

‘Strings?’ she asks, and he nods.

Letting the door swing shut behind her, she approaches at a creep that makes him chuckle, and he laughs when she drags a chair over to perch and watch him.

‘Do you know how to change strings?’ he asks, and she looks at him. ‘Ah, um. These. This? Change strings?’

‘Fix?’ she asks, and he nods.

‘Fix,’ he agrees.

She shakes her head. ‘Never did.’

So without further ado, he shifts his weight and turns the guitar around so the headstock is between them, rather than at his far side. He hooks a heel over the edge of the chair to wedge the guitar in place against him, freeing up both hands to work on the strings and keep them out of the way of her view.

‘Course,’ he tells her, contemplative, ‘changing a bass is a bit different to changing a classic, but since I’m already here, I’ll show you bass strings.’

‘I see,’ she says, though she’s hesitant, and really doesn’t see at all.

Murdoc just laughs, and tells her to watch carefully. He’s finished with the string he’d been working on, which gives him a chance to start from the beginning with the next.

It’s hard for him to go slow, she can tell. His fingers trip over themselves as they unwind the string from the peg, because he’s clearly used to doing it at a much faster speed, and he explains that he doesn’t normally bother with this step as he uncoils the string, because he knows how long to cut his strings, but he uncoils it anyway to get it through the tree.

‘Cut strings?’ she asks, and he nods.

‘Aye, guitars are all different sizes, right? So if, like yours, it’s a smaller guitar, the strings would be too long. So you have to cut them.’

She watches, fascinated, as he pulls the right string from the pack – without looking, she notes, which means he’s doing it by feel, or maybe muscle memory – and hands her one end, and the end of the old string.

‘Hold them together,’ he says, and she nods, lines them up perfectly. ‘Alright, see? This new one is longer. We need them the same length.’

He’s quiet as they work, gentle almost. He doesn’t have that grumpy crease between his eyebrows, and it’s nice, spending time with him like this, and he seems – he seems –

It’s almost like he’s _happy_. Noodle has seen him laugh and grin before, but he’s never seemed so relaxed, so calm. She decides that this is how she likes him most.

She watches his hands as he works. She answers all of his questions and asks more of her own, but his hands are fascinating. Hands tell stories, like faces and shoes and smiles, and these hands, she decides, tell a lot more stories than she thinks she could ever know. That split in his thumbnail is still there, all the others dirtied and stained, and his rings glint in the studio lights, but it’s the blisters and stains and scabs that fascinate her more. She has blisters of her own, forming where the strings have bit into her fingers. He keeps giving her plectrums, but he doesn’t use them, so neither does she. He’s got yellowing skin down two fingers – nicotine stains, she learns later, ones that’d fade if he stopped smoking – and scabs on every knuckle, blood clotted into the creases. His veins and his tendons are blackened, stark against the ashen, unhealthy pallor of his skin. It’s not the same pallor 2D has; 2D’s skin is that doll-like porcelain, burning at the faintest hint of sun and so prone to bruising. Murdoc’s is sicklier, the skin of a man who’d long since given up taking care of himself.

They aren’t very nice hands all told, but she loves them anyway.

It doesn’t take long for him to get the last strings changed on the bass, and he strums idly, curling a lip.

‘Close,’ he says, with a grunt, and drops his leg to position the guitar as if he’s going to play properly.

‘Tuning?’ she asks, and he nods.

‘Yep, it’s not far off. E string’s the worst.’

She listens to the twang of the strings as he plucks with one hand and twists the pins with the other. A turn and a half and the E string is perfectly in tune, a familiar rumble of sound that curls like pain in her chest, but it’s a nice pain, familiar. Nostalgia, maybe, but how can she be nostalgic of something she still has? If she remembers later, she’ll ask Russel for the word to describe the feeling.

‘Better fast?’ she asks then, and he hums, fingers flitting over the other strings and pins and tightening up a half-turn here, a de-turn there, until the guitar sounds just right.

‘Say again?’ he replies, looks over at her.

‘Mm. Is it – ah, um. Do you do better fast? Tuning?’

‘Do I tune better if I do it quickly?’

‘Yes!’

‘Well, it’s not something you can rush,’ he hedges, because he feels like he’s missing part of the conversation.

Noodle puffs her cheeks out and thinks hard about how to give him the rest of the question.

‘If you. Change strings fast. Better tuning?’

He mulls these words over, adds the rest.

‘Oh!’ he says, when he’s got it. ‘You mean; is the tuning more accurate when I change the strings at my normal speed?’

She mulls _these_ words over, and then nods.

‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

He gets up to put the bass away and pulls El Diablo off of its hook, returning with another pack of strings. She shifts in her seat, leans in, and watches, absolutely enthralled, as his hands flit, fingers bending and twisting and working perfectly, over the guitar, pulling strings away and she beams at him as it takes him barely a quarter of the time.

‘Very quick!’ she chirps, and he grins.

‘Lots of practice, sweetheart,’ he replies, ‘twenty years of it, give or take.’

‘Twenty years,’ she mumbles, and he watches from the corner of his eye, strumming to check the tuning, as she counts the years off on her fingers. ‘You were – twe – twel – thirteen!’

‘About that, yeah. I might have been a little older.’

She gets an adorable little frown on her lips then, pursed, and eyebrows knotting.

‘Long time,’ she says, and she pauses to consider this. ‘Old man.’

He barks with laughter, and reaches over to pinch her arm. ‘Don’t be mean,’ he chides, gentle, and when she grins up at him, he’s refusing to look at her, trying very hard to pout and look upset, but he’s grinning too widely.

She laughs, and he laughs too, a proper, genuine laugh. She likes his genuine laugh the best. He doesn’t laugh like this often, because he says he’s always in a bad mood, so all of his laughter is forced through gritted teeth, but this is nice. It’s not as gravelly, and there’s a spark of _something_ catching on his tongue, a snowflake of happiness. It burns instantly of course, melting into nothingness, but it’s there, if you know where to look, and Noodle is the best at hide-and-seek.

‘Is it tuned?’ she asks, realising that she hasn’t seen him turn any pegs.

He strums with a smug curl of his lip, picks out a quick tune, and she listens, laughs.

‘Good tuning!’

‘Good tuning,’ he agrees, and for a few minutes, they sit there quietly, Murdoc strumming away, not playing anything Noodle recognises, but easy tunes all the same, ones she can tap her feet to.

Eventually, she asks, ‘can I try? Changing strings?’

He nods, tells her he was waiting for her to ask, and she hurries over to the rack to get her Les Paul. He sets El Diablo down and when she sits next to him, and reminds her that changing a classic’s strings is different.

With a jerk of her head, she carefully begins turning the pegs to loosen the strings to make them easier to remove.

‘Do you want some pliers?’ Murdoc asks, and she kicks at him, missing – deliberately – by a few feet. He has no doubt that if she’d wanted to kick him, she would have, and probably broken his shin in the process. Laughing, he accepts her refusal with an, ‘alright, alright, don’t be like that, I was only asking.’

She takes what he said whilst stringing the bass and applies it to her guitar. The placement of the pegs and the strings are slightly different, but the principle, from what she can see, is mostly the same. Whenever she gets stuck and the answer doesn’t immediately leap out of the guitar at her, she asks, and he answers. Mostly, they sit in silence, Murdoc watching with that smug, proud little smile he gets when she starts hissing and snarling like a cat at people making assumptions and he doesn’t need to do a damn thing, because she’s got it all under control.

That’s what she likes about him. He’s just as prone to babying her as the other two are, picking her up and carrying her around and coddling her, but he knows, perhaps better than the other two, that if she didn’t want them to, she’d never allow it, and he always backs off to just take the credit for her achievements without a bat of his eyelashes. He understands her in a way she doesn’t think anyone else ever will, but she doesn’t have the words yet to ask him about it. That, above everything else, is getting to be a real bother. Next time she talks to Alan, she’ll see about getting more English lessons.

As she measures out the strings, she spares him a glance; he’s watching her with those mismatched eyes of his – does it count, she wonders, as heterochromia, when it isn’t genetics that caused his eye to redden? – with that same unblinking stare he gets when he’s thinking too hard about something that ultimately doesn’t matter. He stares at 2D like that a lot, she knows, because he’s always thinking about how they met. He’ll deny it, of course, but he is, she’s sure of it.

When he realises she’s looking back, he blinks, smiles. It’s a fake smile – it doesn’t reach his eyes.

She wonders what he’s thinking about tonight.

‘You’re doing good, kiddo,’ he tells her, and gestures with a hand. ‘Come on then, what’s next?’

She lists everything she’s done, and they both pretend that they’re doing it so she can run through the process in her head rather than telling him what it is she’s done. He nods with each item added to the list, and she flushes in her ears as he asks what the next step is.

‘I restring the guitar,’ she says, and he nods. ‘Pins gotta be in place.’

‘Yep.’

They fall back into silence; Murdoc shifts uncomfortably in his chair, as if the thoughts she’d disturbed had been ones he’d not been wanting to think about. She watches him from under her hair as she lets her hands find the right places for the strings, and he smiles a little.

‘You’re a natural,’ he tells her, and she nods.

‘Learnt from the best,’ she replies, and manages to catch the red flush peaking in his cheeks and ears as he clears his throat and turns away.

Having sufficiently stoked his ego and broken whatever spell had been cast on him, she finishes the strings with a flourish, and presents the guitar to him.

‘What about tuning?’ he asks, eyebrow raised, and she grumbles, pulls the guitar back to test it out.

The tuning is God-awful, but he doesn’t laugh, just reminds her to stretch the strings before tuning.

‘No use in snapping them when they’re just been put on,’ he tells her, and she nods, sticks her tongue out in concentration.

Once she’s tuned the guitar, taking her time with it, and laughing whenever Murdoc winces at a particularly bad note, she presents the guitar again.

It’s small on him, and it makes her laugh, hurry over to the rack to get one of his spare bass guitars down from the wall. Everybody learnt a long time ago to not touch El Diablo.

(Not, as Murdoc would flounce and shout and glare, because it was _his_ guitar, but because it was the _Devil’s_ , and Murdoc had it on loan. It was agreeable to Murdoc, because Murdoc had signed over his soul for it. For the others to touch it was not only a great offence to the guitar and the Big Man Below, but also possibly dangerous. 2D had tried it once, and his palm had been burnt black for weeks.)

‘Do you know how to play bass?’ he teases, and she sticks her tongue out, slams her hand down the strings the same way he always does when he wants them to shut up and play. Without the amps attached, it’s a feeble sound, not loud at all. ‘Well, then, better get some amps set up, eh?’

She doesn’t miss the way he turns the volume up to full, tipping them forward to reverberate through the floor, and almost opens her mouth to ask if he was thinking about 2D and the _girl_ he’s got round, but he’s handing her the jack, and she dismisses the thought in favour of the safety of music instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Kids With Guns.  
> \- Many thanks to studybass dot com for teaching me how to restring a bass guitar for a 2k fic god bless you. Also, apparently stringing different guitars is different but it all went over my head.  
> \- In phase one, Murdoc wore at least two rings, one with a bat’s wings on it (seen in the 19-2000 video), and one shaped like a skull, which appears in some of the posters and RotO art.  
> \- Alan is Noodle’s translator in phase one. Murdoc categorically ignores everything he says.  
> \- I tried really hard to give Noodle a distinct voice from the boys, especially given that she’s an amnesiac ten-year-old, but I don’t know how well I pulled it off, if at all.   
> \- In other news, I am super duper grateful to everyone who’s reviewed, it really makes my morning when I wake up to even one review, it’s a nice little boost to my ego. This fandom has been so good to me in the couple of months I’ve been here, so I’m really glad I’m here, and glad you’re liking this silly little fic. (Little? It’s like 20k words hahaha)  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	16. Too Short Pyjama Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Russel has been saying it for weeks, but it's only now that Murdoc listens. [Phase 1]

‘Right, lads,’ Murdoc says late in the morning after they’ve calmed the hysteria down to a workable level. By “they,” it’s really just Murdoc, who had yelled incoherently at the top of his lungs until everyone else stopped screaming. ‘I think it’s safe to say that was a close shave. Can we agree on something for once and do the right thing here?’

Russel, sat hiding behind the paper, face stoplight red, giggles. It’s a nervous, traumatised sort of giggle. 2D stares at the paper, and wrings his hands. He hasn’t stopped trembling.

Murdoc despairs.

‘Look,’ he tries instead, determined not to be the only one taking responsibility here. ‘Noodle almost saw dicks for a second there, and as fond as I am of mine, I don’t much fancy a – how old is she?’

‘Nine,’ 2D tells him. ‘Nineteen-ninety.’

‘Right. Well, a nine-year-old seeing my dick is not something I want any time soon. We need to get our arses covered on this.’

Russel appears to have composed himself, and manages to look over the top of the paper. ‘I said we needed to do something weeks ago, but you never listen.’

Murdoc waves his hand. ‘I never said no, I said we didn’t need to worry about it just yet. I didn’t think we’d be having another psychological-fuck-up in the building. Like, look here, right, 2D screaming and running down the corridor starkers is one thing, we’ve all got dicks, right? Not anything we’ve never seen before. We’re all adults here – well, I wonder ‘bout that some days but the point stands that we’re all legally adults in the eyes of law – so it isn’t anything we can’t deal with, yeah? But with a little one, the screaming and stark-bollock-naked run-arounds have to be kept to a minimum regardless. But if she’s doing it too, we’re all fucked. Get it?’

‘No?’ 2D replies, and he’s looked lost since the first mention of his naked screaming.

Murdoc groans, as though this is all very troublesome. ‘What I mean is; someone’s going to call the social on us if she keeps running in on us naked, screaming her head off about nightmares.’

‘I see,’ 2D says, though Murdoc doubts it.

‘So as bothersome as it is, we need to start sleeping in clothes.’

‘Like, pyjamas?’ 2D asks.

‘Well, I mean – if you want to look bent.’

2D considers this. ‘What else is there?’

‘T-shirt and boxers,’ Russel offers, because that’s what he’s been sleeping in since Noodle arrived. ‘Even just your underwear would be an improvement. I mean, you are very handsome, ‘D, but there’s only so many times a month I can see your dick before I begin to go mad.’

2D flushes. ‘Is it really that bad?’

‘It’s been at least four nights a week since we moved here,’ Russel tells him. ‘How we haven’t gone mad is anybody’s guess.’

‘I’ve never not been mad,’ Murdoc offers. Well, as long as he’s the one saying it. ‘So are we in agreement then? We need to start wearing clothes.’

Russel grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like, ‘that’s what I’ve been saying for the last four months,’ but Murdoc ignores him.

**\+ + + +**

Murdoc has apparently chosen the T-shirt and underwear route, so he doesn’t bother coming with them into town, opting instead to play babysitter. He assures Russel that he’ll keep Noodle entertained, even though he has readily shown himself to be totally boring in regards to non-explicit entertainment, and Russel takes 2D down to London to buy pyjamas.

For most of the drive, they sit quietly, 2D babbling occasionally about something he sees on the road or about Kong. Once he talks about the time before Russel, when it was just him and Murdoc, and Russel wonders if he’ll ever willingly talk about Paula.

Most likely not, though. Not that Russel blames him in the least; Murdoc’s a piece of work, able to ramp up the charm as and when he needs it, and he’d been nothing but a charmer the week or so after she’d left. It had been easier for 2D to pin all the blame on Paula, and maybe she had been more at fault. Russel is mature enough to admit he had not given her a chance to defend herself, though there is a part of him that he suspects is mostly Del, that thinks she wouldn’t have defended herself anyway; she’d looked remarkably proud of herself.

Thinking about Paula, or rather, thinking about what Paula had meant to the poor kid, and what had happened in stall number three makes him want to break Murdoc’s nose another five times, or maybe just knock five of his teeth out, so Russel turns his attention – and by extension, 2D’s – to a discussion of what kind of nightwear 2D would like.

‘Pyjamas would be cool,’ 2D says, in that absent, inattentive way he has sometimes. His gaze is out of the window, and his ears are red.

After the morning they’ve already had, Russel decides to put what remains of his sanity first and doesn’t ask.

London is bustling, but it always is, and 2D is happy to follow Russel around to find some pyjamas. Russel knows from trying it over a week ago that 2D is difficult to fit; his inseam – and Russel did not get the gratitude he deserved for getting on his knees to measure it – is almost forty inches, so thank God he has quality jeans that’ll last him a while.

‘Have you always been this lanky?’ he asks the boy.

2D shrugs.

‘Mum says I grew like a weed.’ He looks sad then. ‘I should call her, shouldn’t I?’

Russel nods with a soft him, and leads him into a store with his hand on his back. ‘I think it’d be nice. Do they know you’re even alive?’

Stu supposes not, but it’s easy to distract him with a choice of pyjamas. They’re all a few inches short on the leg, but 2D doesn’t seem to care that, when he tries them on, you can see the top of his socks.

‘Are you alright with those?’ Russel asks. ‘They won’t keep your legs warm in winter.’

‘Don’t we have heating though? I can get long socks, like the ones that - ‘

He stops, and frowns. Russel eases the conversation to talk of patterns and materials, steering him away from thoughts of Paula.

When the search proves fruitless, they go for lunch, and 2D picks at his food, eventually asks if he did something wrong.

‘How do you mean?’ Russel asks but 2D’s phone rings, and he never completes the thought.

‘Allo, Muds! Yeah? Zombies? Aww, I always miss out on the fun stuff! Yeah. Yeah, I’ll let him know. Yeah, alright. Bye. Bye.’

He hangs up and huffs, slaps his phone down on the counter. ‘No _fair_! They’re fighting zombies, and he said we gotta stay out for another hour at _least_ , till they ring to let us know it’s safe. Harrumph!’

Russel laughs and assures 2D that it’s fine. ‘We still haven’t found your pyjamas. What about a movie after that, though? If they haven’t called?’

2D says that he thinks there’s a new horror flick out, and Russel cannot think of anything he wants to watch less, but 2D will be mad all day of he doesn’t get to match the gore content of his missed zombie killing. Not that anyone in their right mind would let 2D anywhere near anything he could hurt himself or his bandmates with. _Especially_ not something capable of a fatal injury.

‘That sounds great, ‘D,’ Russel says, and 2D seems to be contented with a movie.

‘We need to get pyjamas first, though,’ he says, and frowns a little, as though the fun of it’s been sapped.

Maybe it has. Understanding the exact processes for 2D’s thoughts is one of the most wear-you-down activities Russel has ever partaken in. They’ve known each other for maybe two or three months now, maybe four at a push, time flows weirdly in Kong. It’s not nearly enough time for Russel to really _like_ the kid; oh, he likes him, sure, he’s a nice lad, but he’s not like anyone Russel’s ever met, and sometimes he’s hard to work with.

‘Yeah,’ Russel agrees, ‘let’s finish lunch and we’ll try somewhere else.’

2D gets back into hunting for pyjamas by the third shop they try, and when he finds a pair he likes, he asks what Russel thinks, and Russel tells him that his choice is nice.

‘They’re absolutely horrible,’ 2D says, giving him a look over the truly ugly paisley fabric. ‘I want them; they’ll _really_ drive Muds mad.’

‘Is that a wise idea?’

But 2D has a smile on his face like he’s got a scheme brewing, something that he’s not thought through and will likely earn him a shiner, but he doesn’t seem to care.

‘Is this because you didn’t get to kill zombies?’ Russel asks, and ducks down to find 2D’s size, glancing at him before pulling one of the packs from the hook to look at the size chart.

‘Not at all,’ 2D says, in the most obviously-lying voice he’s ever used.

‘Well, if he breaks your nose, you’re going to deserve it, you know that? But never mind that, do you remember what your hips are?’

‘They’re here,’ 2D says, and puts his hands on his hips.

At this point, Russel cannot say with any certainty whether he’s doing it deliberately.

‘I mean the measurement.’

‘Oh!’

2D twists, and folds the waist of his jeans over to try and see the measurement printed on the back. When he can’t get the angle right, he shuffles back so Russel can see.

‘Medium, then,’ Russel says, looking at the numbers, and shoves the Extra-Large in his hand back onto the hook to find a Medium.

2D seems happy enough to carry it, and Russel asks if he wants another pair.

‘Do I need another pair?’

Russel almost, _almost_ , despairs.

‘Well, it’d make sense, wouldn’t it? That way you can alternate every week for laundry, you see?’

‘Not really.’

‘You need more than one pair of pyjamas, ‘D.’

He chooses a sensible pair this time, one with a nice red check on them.

‘Do you want pyjamas?’ he asks as they head to the counter.

‘No, I’ve got my nightwear already sorted,’ Russel assures him, because he’d been lobbying for these idiots to wear nightwear the night that FedEx box arrived on their doorstep. ‘Is there anything else you need whilst we’re here? Underwear or socks or a coat or anything?’

‘You sound like my Dad,’ 2D laughs, and thinks about it.

After some deliberation, he calls Murdoc, who is not at all happy to be disturbed in the middle of zombie-killing.

‘The fuck do you want?’ he grunts, and 2D rocks between one foot and the other.

‘Is there anything else I need?’ he asks, ‘like socks or coats or anything?’

‘You need some common sense, fuck me,’ Murdoc tells him, and adds, to Noodle, who 2D can just about hear in the background, ‘shoot it in the fuckin’ head!’

Then he hangs up, and 2D is left stood there staring at his phone.

‘I could do with some socks,’ he says, and offers up a bright smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title is totally made up and not a lyric, haha.  
> \- I feel like 2D’s mobile is a Nokia 3210. It came out in 1999, and I know people who still have functioning ones. Not even our precious baby is going to break it without some serious effort.   
> \- If you go to pjpan.co.uk, there are a pair of truly ugly paisley pyjamas in midnight blue and neon green and I am 100% convinced those are the pyjamas 2D has chosen. Even though they’re designed for tall men, I bet they run short.  
> \- The greatest mystery is are they killing zombie or playing a video game? The world will never know.  
> \- Fun fact; on my pc this file is saved as gbite 284 and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about my numbering system that you need to know, then I'm sorry, I can't help you any more than that.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	17. Today is Golden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The band go to a theme park and it goes about as well as you’d expect. [Phase 1]

They leave early in the morning, Murdoc at the wheel as is normal. When not showing off, he’s a surprisingly sensible driver, though he is prone to a serious case of road rage and shitty radio stations.

‘Driver picks the music,’ he sing-songs when 2D complains, crooning like that trodden duck he is, and 2D, in the passenger seat as per usual, rubs at his temples.

Just to be an ass, because he hasn’t been to sleep yet, because no sleep is better than the two or three hours he’d get if he tried, Murdoc turns the radio up.

Noodle has learnt just enough English now to recognise the words to the song and sings along, dancing in her seat. Russel is great at many things, but singing isn’t really one of them. It doesn’t stop him. Eventually, 2D joins in.

Murdoc grumbles the entire time, but 2D can see his fingers tapping to the beat against the wheel.

They’re chasing the dawn, and 2D makes some comparison to storm chasing that makes Murdoc snort and Russel reach over the seat to clap him on the shoulder. Something profound, then, but 2D wishes he could remember what he said.

They drive like that for maybe an hour, singing and laughing and enjoying themselves. Noodle is the most awake of the four of them, and Russel laments not being able to drink enough caffeine to match her without needing to piss like a horse every five minutes. Murdoc has to agree with him, but gets told that driving drunk is technically illegal.

‘Never stopped me before,’ he says, even though having a ten-year-old in the backseat of the car is exactly what’s stopped him for the last eight months. ‘Made the band, that did.’

2D looks at him, and Murdoc glares ahead at the car in front, ears red, and beeps his horn because the bastard is going two miles under the speed limit.

‘Look, what exit am I taking?’ Murdoc asks, and changes lane three times before 2D finally locates their position on the map, telling him to take the next right.

Murdoc swerves, illegally, into that lane, almost hits two cars, and wedges himself in between a Land Rover that the stupid bastard absolutely _cannot_ drive (or so Murdoc maintains), and a people carrier full of children.

He makes a joke about said children that almost has him breaking his nose on the wheel when Noodle kicks him in the back of the head. The only thing that saves him is that the girl can’t quite reach him properly because of the headrest. It still bruises his scalp, though. Russel laughs until he’s almost sick, and Murdoc vows to “get him” at the first available opportunity. He’s not sure what it is exactly that he’ll do, but he’ll do it.

He makes the turn with less drifting than he normally would, and they wind their way through roads and roads and country lanes until eventually they’re pulling up at some towering, ridiculous, theme park.

It even has a zoo attached.

They’re not open yet, but that’s fine, Russel had the foresight to bring breakfast and they crawl out of the car to stretch their legs and fill their bellies. 2D hauls Noodle up onto the boot so she can sit at least somewhat level to them and Murdoc wanders off to the Pay and Display point, hand digging into a pocket for his cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke in the car anymore, because it makes Noodle cough, and he doesn’t want to put up with it.

That’s the only reason.

Some young family with a pair of toddlers eye him suspiciously as he roots for loose change, and he gives them his most simpering smile. The dad hesitates, and Murdoc levels his gaze, but then the man’s awkwardly, stuttering all the way, asking for his autograph. Surprised, because he’d been expecting a fight – he’s wearing a vest, after all, and he always gets into trouble for that, something about an inverted cross being inappropriate for kids or some such tripe – Murdoc agrees, and scrawls his name across the paper offered him.

When he comes back, having had his nicotine fix and obtained the sticker to park legally, Noodle has a paper plate stacked high and 2D is making her laugh by doing a walrus impression with cocktail sausages. Murdoc stops to watch him, and wishes he thought to bring a camera.

Russel catches his eye and lifts his hands; he has a camera.

Good man.

Propping himself on the other side of the boot after sticking the sticker in the window, Murdoc steals a mini scotch egg from Noodle’s plate and laughs when she slaps his hand.

It doesn’t take long for the park to open, and they stroll on in, Murdoc with his hands shoved in his pockets, Noodle between Russel and 2D, holding their hands and swinging, skipping along to keep pace.

 They’re recognised in the queue to get in, of course they are, how many eclectic quartets do you see? Murdoc, in over thirty years on this miserable planet, has never met someone with natural blue hair before, and he’s met many people like him, but none of them have been so undeniably attached to a group that don’t match quite as much as they don’t.

The whispers that run up and down the queue as Noodle asks question after question after question about the park that not one of them can answer make both Murdoc and Russel grin, but they go mostly unbothered.

Someone tries to take a picture of Noodle, and Russel puts his shoulders back and makes it clear that photos are not allowed.

Murdoc’s just glad he doesn’t have to break a knuckle on the bastard.

At the ticket booth some ten minutes later – and how did the queue build so quickly, because they’d been there _early_ – Murdoc pulls out his wallet to pay, only for 2D to shove fifty quid in his face.

‘The fuck’s that?’ he asks.

‘For me and Noods,’ 2D says, and waves it.

Murdoc looks at him. 2D grins back. Shrugging, Murdoc pulls out the sixty for him and Russel and asks for three adults and a child. The girl on the counter has new snake bites and a half-shaved head and she’s nervous. Probably her first time seeing famous people.

‘She fancies you,’ he tells 2D, and the girl squeaks.

2D squeaks back and tries to hide behind Murdoc, even though he’s seven inches taller.

Once they have their tickets, the girl stammers for an autograph, and they even lift Noodle up to the counter so she can sign the back of a receipt for the girl.

‘She was nice,’ Murdoc says with a waggle of his eyebrows, handing the tickets out before tucking his away in his wallet.

2D is flustered by this, but gets distracted by Noodle shoving her ticket at him for safe-keeping and then clearly forgets all about the girl.

‘Alright then,’ Russel says, and holds the map open for them to see. ‘Where to first?’

The sun glares in just the right place that Noodle can’t see, so 2D lifts her into a piggyback and she peers over his shoulder.

‘Haunted House,’ Murdoc says.

‘Haunted House,’ Noodle agrees.

‘Dodgems,’ 2D says, determined and ignores the looks the two give him.

Russel sighs. This is where the trouble begins, he thinks.

‘Right,’ he says, and thinks carefully about how to phrase this.

2D absolutely cannot be left to his own devices; they’ve tried this game before, letting him loose in a big open space, and Murdoc was not happy about being called five times over the intercom to come and collect “a Mister Two Dents from Guest Services” or lost property, depending on which he stumbles upon first. It’s not his fault, not really, but 2D gets lost easily and forgets to either call Russel – Murdoc will see 2D’s name on the screen and point-blank refuse to answer the call – or wait at the exit for them to come find him. And if Murdoc loses his temper at something, he’ll cause mischief and either be kicked out or forced to wait with security until someone comes to collect him. Noodle, meanwhile, is ten, and when she gets upset, she forgets how to speak English, and unsupervised, upset children, so it says in the guide, are automatically taken to Guest Services, where the lost child will be looked after until their guardians arrive. Russel is in no mood – it’s a bright, sunny day, nice and warm and with a pleasant breeze, and Murdoc’s not threatened violence yet – to spend the day trekking back and forth collecting errant band members.

‘Right,’ he says again.

‘I’ll take Noodle over to the Haunted House,’ Murdoc suggests, ‘we’re the only two what want to see it, right?’ He glances across at Noodle. ‘You wanna do the dodgems?’

She does, and tells him as such, wriggles her way off of 2D’s back to reach up and hold Murdoc’s hand. He lets her, adjusts his skull ring to not rub her fingers.

‘Right. Well, if faceache can hold onto that until we’re done, we’ll do the dodgems together, yeah?’

Murdoc being reasonable is actually rather nice. Russel is not particularly fond of Murdoc by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s easy to see how he gets people to do things his way. He stands a little straighter, talks lower, smoother. Almost looks like a grown man and not a sulky teenager.

Russel checks his watch. ‘It’s nine-thirty now, so why don’t we go scout out the best lunch menus?’ he offers to 2D.

 ‘Always with the food,’ Murdoc hums, as though in on some really good inside joke.

Russel flips him off and Noodle tells him to be nice.

‘Sorry,’ he says, sincere.

2D considers it, and then looks at Noodle.

‘We won’t be long!’ she promises, ‘we’ll have to leave because we’ll scare people.’

2D glances at Murdoc and then says, ‘that isn’t hard.’

He immediately jumps out of Murdoc’s reach, but the older man acts his older age and just laughs. The white-knuckle grip Noodle has on his hand probably has something to do with that.

 ‘Besides,’ Russel says, and looks at the guide some more, ‘not all the rides are open until ten-thirty. So we can’t get on the dodgems yet anyway.’

2D pouts. Russel promises to buy him candyfloss which cheers him up immensely.

With a promise to meet at the dodgems in an hour, Murdoc and Noodle disappear into the already-thick crowd in the general direction of the Haunted House, and Russel and 2D follow the map to the food stands and restaurants.

An hour passes quickly, and they head to the dodgems to find Murdoc and Noodle sat on a bench, eating chips.

‘How long have you been sat there?’ 2D asks, and flops onto the other side of Noodle to steal some of her chips.

‘About forty minutes,’ Murdoc says, and hands Russel his box to fish a cigarette out of his pocket and shove it in his mouth, lighting it in the same motion. ‘We got kicked out.’

‘Murdoc punched one of the zombies,’ Noodle says, and switches sides with Murdoc so the breeze doesn’t blow smoke in her face. He rather obligingly shuffles down the bench to give her room, and then shuffles again when 2D complains about not being able to reach her chips.

‘They’re really good at make-up,’ Murdoc shrugs, unapologetic. ‘It looked like one of the ones from Kong.’

 That’s great publicity, that. Bassist of hottest new band _Gorillaz_ punches member of staff at theme park. Incredible. Russel can already see the headlines.

‘You’re an idiot,’ he says, but he eats the chips anyway.

Whilst Murdoc smokes – letting 2D go halves on it, because he’s in a remarkably good mood after causing some kind of trouble – and Russel and Noodle finish off the chips, they make plans for lunch, and 2D says that his favourite of the restaurants is the pirate one.

‘They do all sorts,’ Russel explains, ‘like a proper restaurant.’

(They all see the flash of a camera and ignore it. Some paparazzi who was apparently out on a family adventure of their own happened to see them and sells a photo of Murdoc and 2D brushing fingers as the cigarette changes hands to a gossip mag. Murdoc finds the whole thing hilarious, but 2D is embarrassed about it to the point of blurting it out in a radio interview. Being in _Heat!_ should not be such an issue when they’ve got a cult following like they have, and Murdoc has to try and diffuse the situation before they get _more_ fanmail about their sex lives. He fails, miserably, but at least they have some fuel for the bonfire when they have to burn more zombies.)

‘Do they do noodles?’ Noodle asks.

Russel says he didn’t see any on the menu.

‘That’s sad,’ she sighs, and eats her last chip.

 Cigarette finished and chips eaten, they check the time and head in to the dodgems. Ten minutes and two bloody noses later and they’re sat in the first aid station.

‘How do you have a driving license?’ Russel asks, looking at Murdoc with an expression somewhere between amazement and exasperation, complete with spread hands and tilted head.

Murdoc refuses to answer, and asks the nurse if 2D’s nose is broken, pretending rather well that he’s not looking down her blouse. She assures him it’s not, and asks 2D if he, like Noodle, would like a sticker. He very much would and he chooses one with a monkey on it. It has one of those little nurse hats with the red crosses on. It’s sickeningly cute.

‘You’re twenty-one,’ Murdoc tells him, as though this will change a damn thing.

2D slaps the sticker onto his chest with more force than necessary, and smoothes it out proudly.

Noodle is a little shaken up from the crash, even though, as she herself admits, she did cause it by driving headlong into Murdoc and 2D’s car at full speed. (Murdoc had, admittedly, been doing the same thing, but neither of them had really factored into the fact that 2D was not holding on and Noodle is only ten and not really prepared for the shock of the collision.)

As they leave the station and head for a less-dangerous activity, Murdoc, denying feeling guilty at all, picks Noodle up to carry her around for a while. She opts to not complain about it, and settles against his spine like a lazy cat, cheek pressed against the back of his shoulder. He keeps easy pace with 2D, who’s equilibrium is still a little off despite being sick (and Murdoc has _never_ seen someone throw up neon blue without the aid of alcohol before because blue lagoon really knew how to catch you by surprise) and 2D keeps rubbing Noodle’s back.

‘I think we should probably go for lunch,’ Russel offers, ever the voice of reason in the madness that has apparently become their lives.

Murdoc hikes Noodle higher on his back, and nods.

‘Probably a good idea,’ he agrees with a sniff. ‘And then we’ll do the rides or whatever.’

2D groans, and Murdoc looks at him.

‘I wanna do rides,’ Noodle hums, and her helmet is sun-hot against Murdoc’s ear when her head droops on his shoulder. ‘The big ones.’

‘I don’t know if you’re big enough,’ Russel says.

Noodle pouts. 2D pats her back.

They sit outside so that Murdoc and 2D can smoke and whilst they wait for their food, they look at the map again so that they can decide which ones they can and can’t do. Noodle is too short for some of the bigger rides, and Murdoc is about halfway out of his seat to go and steal a bunch of free pamphlets from the stand against the far wall to shove in her shoes and boost her the inch or so she needs, but Russel tells him to park his arse.

Murdoc glares and goes ignored.

They eat in relatively undisturbed peace; people have noticed 2D and Noodle’s bruising noses, and are recognising them as a famous band, but no one seems to want to come and interrupt. This suits Murdoc just fine, and he shoves his mostly-untouched plate over to Russel, who has already finished his. He props his feet up on the edge of Noodle’s chair and slouches, waiting for the others. 2D finishes what of his food he can, but he claims he’s still full from breakfast, and passes his plate across to Noodle.

‘You know,’ Russel starts, as Murdoc taps ash from the end of his cigarette into his empty mug, ‘you two really ought to eat more.’

‘And you really ought to eat less,’ Murdoc replies before 2D can open his mouth to defend himself. ‘We’re grown men, if I wanted a lecture I’d call D’s mother and tell her about it.’

 Russel does not look impressed, but lets it go, because they’re out in public, and not fighting, and it is not worth the same argument over and over again.

‘Can we have one day, Muds? One day, that’s all I’m asking.’

Murdoc gives him that raised-brow, pursed-lip look of someone who’s feigning innocence, and putting all the blame on you, and Russel decides to just drop everything entirely and proceeds to ignore the ass until they need to communicate.

‘Come on then,’ he says, when Noodle is done eating and she’s had long enough to settle her belly for a few minutes. ‘Let’s go find the bathrooms, and then we’ll check out the rides, how about that?’

Noodle nods, excited, and grabs his hand to drag him to the large map outside the restaurant. Laughing, Murdoc and 2D follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from The Parish of Space Dust. I’m going to start running out of lyrics soon, I think.  
> \- They’re at Drayton Manor the fucking losers.  
> \- My biggest kink is Murdoc being a responsible adult, more shocking revelations at 11.  
> \- Chips are fries, though I’m sure everyone knows that.  
> \- I don’t know if Heat! circulates outside of the UK, but it’s such fucking trash. It’s like publicised Perez Hilton, it is so fucking awful I cannot believe.  
> \- Blue lagoon is a cocktail with Curaçao in it and it’s probably one of my favourite cocktails but it is neon blue and stays neon blue.  
> \- I bet height restrictions bite Noodle all the time, because she’s so tiny in phase 1.  
> \- Apologies for the delay on this one, I was going to finish up a different one for this chapter, but I’ve been quite ill this past week and getting some hella awesome prompts on tumblr. I’m mostly better now though, so posting should get to a somewhat normal schedule (if anybody knows what this schedule is, please let me know, because I don’t lol)   
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	18. Sweetest Inspiration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Russel takes Noodle to see little slices of home. [Phase 1; LA]

A week or so after arriving in Los Angeles, once they’d gotten all the paperwork sorted – by they’d all, Russel means it was him alone sorting it out, because Murdoc sort of just waved a hand with vague promises of finding a pen, and 2D and Noodle were not in any position to be signing official documents and registering at GPs and other such things – Russel immediately began collecting pamphlets and searching online for things for Noodle to do.

Promises of films and their various gigs aside, there wasn’t going to be much going on. Alan would continue her English lessons, of course, but they would be boring if that was all she had to do. Besides, L.A. was a big place, and there would be plenty for them to do. So he clicks around on the search engine, makes a note of a few likely places, and whilst she’s pestering Murdoc and 2D to take her skateboarding or something (he thinks the understanding is that 2D does the activity with her, and Murdoc plays the role of chauffer and sits in the car smoking and catching up on the sleep he doesn’t get otherwise) he hurries off to scope out the places he’d earmarked.

Little Tokyo proves interesting, and he thinks she’ll enjoy being able to talk to people not Alan and be understood again. She’s been wobbling between morose and melancholic ever since they went to Osaka, and he’s not sure taking her to Little Tokyo is the best idea, but he can’t think of what else to do for her, besides leave her to own devices, and the poor girl’s not even eleven yet, what’s she supposed to do? And Little Tokyo is nothing like Osaka was. Maybe it’ll be better for her, a different sort of Japan for her to interact with, maybe one without barely-there bad memories attached to it.

He asks around, and gets some more information, and asks about other things he can do for her – one restaurant owner recognises him, and encourages him to bring Noodle down to see her, and Russel figures she’s as good a starting point as any. She doesn’t set his teeth on edge the way the people Murdoc associates with, and Del seems content enough, which is generally a sign he’s not misreading people.

So he asks about markets and food stores, and purchases a few goods, and as he pads his way back through the streets to the car, he finds himself missing Brooklyn like it’s a phantom limb. In a way, he supposes it is. He’ll never go back, because Brooklyn stinks of blood and gunpowder, and it sticks to the soles of his shoes like it’s still congealing beneath him. Maybe one day he could take Noodle there, to see the sights. It’s a pretty place, when you look past the drive-bys.

He waits a few days, because Murdoc is doing _something_ , and he can’t leave the stupid bastard alone in the event he either kills himself, 2D – who is invariably in the vicinity – or some other poor soul, or brings the house down. Then, when he’s absolutely certain the bassist is face-first and unconscious in his bed and sure not to rise, he tells Noodle to get washed and dressed and ready to go.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks, but doesn’t wait for a reply before she hurries for the bathroom, coming back dressed in some of her nicer clothes, the ones that fit properly and she’s even brushed her hair.

She’s still wearing an ugly hat, though. He forgives the ugly hat because at least she’s got something on her head to protect it from the sun.

In the car as they head down to Little Tokyo, he tells her where they’re headed, and he sees her eyes light up. She beams up at him, and he smiles back. Del thrums warm in his veins, swelling deep in his chest, and it’s the same feeling Russel used to get when he looked at Del. That kindred spirit, life-long love sort of warmth and swelling heart, but it’s gentler, somehow. Noodle is something calming to his soul, something so honest and sweet that he can’t find it in him to care about anything other than getting that smile directed at him.

The moment they set foot on the street outside of the car park, she’s got her hand in his and drags him back and forth, pointing at everything and babbling far too fast for him to even begin to recognise words, never mind translate.

‘I don’t understand,’ he laughs, and she huffs at him, jabs her finger against a pane of glass again. ‘You want that?’

‘Hai!’ she nods, and tugs him into the shop.

He does his best to decipher her, but eventually she gives up and starts babbling in almost-there English instead, telling him things she vaguely remembers, like it’s some kind of déjà vu or maybe some cultural memory of a place she’s never seen.

‘Like ancestor’s memories or something,’ she says, and drags him to a food stall on the market, making grabby hands until he picks her up and she can see over the counter to chatter away to the vendor, and she’s clearly been watching Murdoc pick 2D’s pockets, because she gets his wallet out before he’s even noticed it, and she beams at him as they walk from the vendor, sweets in hand.

He manages to get her to the restaurant with the amiable owner, and they sit with her for a couple of hours, eating and talking and Noodle almost starts glowing as she talks, she’s so fucking happy.

He takes some of that happiness for himself, because she doesn’t need all of it, surely, and it’s nice, being happy.

‘Have you been to Huntingdon Garden?’ the owner asks, and when Noodle looks a bit blank, Russel realises he’s being spoken to.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no, I – I think I know it? The library and art place, right? Yeah, I saw that when I was looking for things for us to do.’

‘There is a Japanese garden there,’ she tells him, and he nods, says that he saw that.

‘Suiho En,’ he says, and both the owner and Noodle laugh.

Noodle touches his arm, laughing more when he blushes, and she teaches him to pronounce it properly. It takes some minutes, because the “ui” sound is somehow, bafflingly, not compatible with his Brooklyn mouth, but when he’s said it to her satisfaction, she nods, and turns back to the conversation. He doesn’t even mind being forcibly ejected, just mouthing the words to himself a couple more times before returning to his plate.

On the drive home, the sun setting in front of them and sending sparks of light dancing across the sky, looking very nice indeed, Russel asks if Noodle would like to go to the garden at Huntingdon.

‘Sure,’ she says, and he glances at her; she’s half-asleep, bless her heart, falling asleep in her seat.

He wishes he’d known that they’d be out so late, because he’d had brought one of those stupidly large plush toys 2D is always buying her with them. She always seems to sleep better holding onto one of them, and she fidgets uncomfortably as she dozes.

Once they’re back at Mulholland, he doesn’t wake her, just carries her up to bed and tells Murdoc to shut his mouth when he opens it. It’s easy to get Noodle settled, pulling off her shoes and her hat, tucking her in and pressing a kiss to her temple, making sure she’s got one of her bears in her arms, and then he’s heading to his computer to investigate the garden some more.

It’s a week or so before they get to go, and he makes sure she knows in advance to wear sensible shoes and something nice. He plans to take photos, and he doesn’t need her with her torn jeans and paint-splattered T-shirts surrounded by pretty flowers and water and bridges and whatnot.

(He forgets, sometimes, that she owns dresses, and nice ones at that, ones that he bought her weeks and months ago, on whims whilst trying to find more socks or whatever he happened to need at the time, and she looks like a totally different girl when she’s not in her capris. He manages to keep the swell of pride down, but he’s pleased that she’s wearing something he bought for her, and looks happy to do so.)

‘Are we going to the garden?’ she asks, as they go to the car.

‘Yep,’ he says with a nod, and pops the boot to put the coolbox in – they’ll need water, and a light lunch, and he wants to make sure that she stays hydrated and fed properly, because Los Angeles is not Essex, and there isn’t a constant drizzle bringing a cool breeze through her lungs – and she puts her oversized monkey toy, which Russel knows is one of 2D’s doings, because it’s about half the size of her, into the boot too, patting it’s head when it flops against the coolbox.

He gives her an askance look, but she just smiles and hurries around to the passenger side.

‘You enjoy that, don’t you?’ he asks a little while later, as they wait in traffic.

‘Enjoy what?’ she asks, fiddling with her skirt, and looks over at him.

‘Sitting shotgun.’

‘Mm,’ she says, and doesn’t expand on it for a few moments. ‘Yes. I don’t get to sit when Murdoc drives.’

‘Because of 2D?’

‘No, just ‘cause,’ she shrugs. ‘He says it’s – hm. He says it’s because there are rules about height in England. I do not understand. I don’t think he wants me in this seat.’

Russel nods a little, had looked up child safety when Noodle first arrived. To be fair to Murdoc, the pair of them had sat at one of the computers at the ass-crack of dawn, blinking at the government regulations on child car safety. The fact that Murdoc, who had already proven himself twice over to be utterly reckless when it came to driving, bothered to enforce at least the front-seat rule, was almost nice.

‘It’s in case of an accident,’ he tells her, and gives her a gentle smile.

She doesn’t look convinced, and tells him that the lights have changed. He doesn’t try to convince her any further, though he does keep a vague, never-to-be-acted-on threat of getting her a booster seat up his sleeve.

Either way, the rest of the drive passes with amiable chit-chat, and they arrive at the gardens just before opening. This suits Russel fine, because it means they have time to sip at water and snack before heading in.

‘Take the bottle with you,’ he tells her, ‘it’s supposed to get hotter than normal today.’

She nods, and holds the bottle tight.

He readies the camera, and they head on in. He should have recorded it, he thinks, because the way she sighs and gasps and coos over the flowers and bridges and little hidden statues and lanterns are sounds he’ll treasure for the rest of his life but will likely never hear again. He takes photos of her throughout their self-led tour, idly snapping shots of her doubled over a flower, or leaning on the bridge to watch the water go by beneath them. There’s one that he knows he’ll have printed out of her on the bridge, turning to beam at him, a hand on her hat and her skirt catching the breeze just so. She’s absolutely beautiful like that, a perfect ray of sunshine, and she laughs and pulls faces and throws the water bottle at him when she realises he’s taken a photo.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he tells her, and she seems taken back for all of two seconds.

‘I know,’ she replies, straightening her shoulders and raising her chin and it’s such a parody of Murdoc that he can’t help but laugh and snap a photo of that too. ‘You’re horrible!’

She’s laughing, though, and hurries over the bridge to round the corner and disappear from view.

‘Don’t go too far!’ Russel calls after her, and hears her call back that she’ll wait by the bench for him.

Knowing that she’ll do just that, because she’s learnt now not to disappear without warning, he takes his time meandering after her, snapping photos of the waterfall and the babbling stream beneath the bridge, the flowers, and even the wide, clear sky overhead before catching up to her.

They take their time, and when Noodle sees a girl in a kimono ahead, she rushes after her.

‘Noodle!’ Russel calls, but Noodle is undeterred, and when he reaches them, they’re deep in conversation, Noodle gesticulating wildly, and the girl in the kimono smiling kindly and nodding, answering whatever questions Noodle apparently has.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says to the girl, ‘she’s quite boisterous.’

Noodle stamps on his foot and says something he doesn’t understand that makes the girl laugh.

‘It’s alright,’ she assures him, and gives Noodle a sweet, gentle little smile that makes her eyes shine. ‘She’s sweet.’

Russel smiles, and the girl asks if they’re done in the garden, because there is a teahouse just down the way, and Russel looks to Noodle, who nods enthusiastically.

‘Could you show us the way?’ he asks, and hastens to add, ‘if you aren’t busy, at all.’

‘Of course not,’ she smiles, and with a subtle dip of her shoulders, as if about to bow before changing her mind, she pads off down the path.

Noodle and Russel exchange glances, and then follow.

‘Would you ever wear one?’ he asks her, gesturing at the kimono the girl is wearing.

Noodle wrinkles her nose.

‘No,’ she says, and brushes her skirt down. It’s heavily pleated, a full circle, he thinks, giving her full range of movement. ‘What if a zombie attacks? How am I supposed to kick it in the head if I can’t even kick Murdoc in the shin?’

She says it loud enough that the girl hears and jumps, turning back to look at the tiny girl beaming at her.

After a moment, she turns back to face the front and finishes leading them to the teahouse before hurrying off. Shame, Russel thinks, and he gestures for Noodle to go in first, she seemed rather nice.

He watches her rather than the tea ceremony, though he does spare it a few glances to take photos, and gets a nice snapshot of Noodle drinking tea. She gets her own back by taking a photo of _him_ doing the same, and he supposes he deserved that.

They thank the woman doing the ceremony for showing them, and take their leave.

‘All that’s really left is the gift shop,’ he says, and somehow, they’ve spent all day here, because it’s almost three in the afternoon, and they’ll have to start heading home soon.

‘Then let’s go,’ she says, ‘get something for Muds and Chee, yeah?’

‘Sure thing.’

Noodle takes her time perusing the items available, and comes trotting back as Russel does the same clutching something different each time. Most of the time, he tells her to put it back, but he accepts the recipe book, and she comes over examining two books, looking very deep in thought. He’s looking at little figurines on display, trying to work out what the patterns on the kimonos are, and almost jumps when she bumps into him.

‘What you got there?’ he asks, ‘you’re very deep in thought.’

‘Books for Chee,’ she says, and shoves them up towards his face.

They’re a pair of books, one on Zen and the other on Buddhism.

‘I don’t know which to get him,’ she says, and he peeks over the top of the books to find her looking rather bothered about it.

‘Why not get both?’ he asks.

It isn’t as though they’re on a particularly tight budget. They have a limited space in the car, yes, but not a limited space in their bank accounts.

She considers it, and then nods, leaves him holding the books and scurries off to find something for Murdoc, who is considerably harder to find something for. She does her best, and comes up trumps with a pretty decanter-looking bottle, decorated with cranes and flowers, and it’s very delicate for Murdoc, but she says that rum is gold and will look nice with the pattern.

‘I don’t think you’re supposed to put alcohol in there,’ he tells her, looking at the bottle.

‘It won’t be in there long enough to matter,’ she says, and traces the pattern with a finger.

The truth of that hurts a little, so he turns his attention to lighter things, asks if there’s anything she’d like.

‘Can I have a parasol?’ she asks, ‘I didn’t get one in Osaka.’

‘You did get a jetpack though,’ he says, and takes the proffered glass bottle to give her free hands so she can look at the parasols.

‘I did,’ she agrees, and for a moment, she hesitates, looking solemn.

Russel opens his mouth to ask if she wants to talk about Osaka, about the nightmares that have plagued her since, sporadic but violent, but the moment passes before he can get the words on his tongue, and she’s twirling parasols behind her head and examining the patterns.

He likes the one with the koi, and she examines it again before nodding and telling him that he has a good eye. The praise makes him feel peculiarly honoured, and he thinks he feels Del’s laughter rumble through his chest, though that might be hunger.

‘All done?’ he asks, and she nods, helps him take their haul to the counter to pay for.

Once they’re back in the car, he asks about Osaka.

‘I’m fine,’ she assures him, and he gives her a side-long glance. ‘Really, I am. I just. It’s strange, going back, you know? Weird. Not nice. I’ll be okay soon. All the moving around.’

Russel remembers the disturbances in his sleep that came from moving around, but most of that could equally be chalked up to the demons and ghosts, and he keeps his mouth shut. They pull over at a picnic spot to eat their now-late lunch, and he asks if she enjoyed today.

‘I did,’ she assures him, and reaches over to cup his face and drag him towards her so she can kiss his cheek, leaving a greasy smear of lunch from her lips there. ‘Thank you for doing this for me.’

‘It’s no problem,’ he laughs, and rubs his cheek with a napkin. ‘I enjoyed it too. Any time you want to go to Little Tokyo, or back to the garden, you let me know, okay? We’ll go any time you want. And you can wear your shorts next time. I just wanted to make sure you looked nice in the pictures.’

‘I bet I look horrible,’ she tells him, and he snorts, informs her that such a thing is impossible.

She grins, and throws a slice of cucumber at him. He throws it back, and she laughs that laugh he’s missed.

‘When we get back,’ she says, and pauses, gnaws at her lip. ‘Can we – we got a garden. Can we put flowers in it? Just a few. The flowers were really nice. And we don’t have any at Kong.’

They’re next to a landfill with no garden to speak of, so unless they have window boxes, or indoor plants, there’s no chance of a garden back home. But home is here now, at least for a while.

‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we’ll look at meanings of flowers when we get home, yeah? So we can put together a garden with flowers that mean something.’

‘Flowers have meanings?’ she asks, ‘like, specific meanings?’

‘Mm-hm. Roses mean love and lilies are for mourning, that kind of thing. But all flowers have a meaning. Success and happiness and there are flowers for a first love and silly things like that.’

‘First love,’ she mumbles and shoves her mouth full of sandwich. When she’s swallowed, she says that she’d like that a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Re-Hash.  
> \- Both locations they visit are legit, though I’ve taken liberties with both, considering I have never been to LA, and certainly wasn’t there in 2001, haha.  
> \- Noodle does wear dresses and/or skirts in phase one (she’s wearing a skirt in the Rock the House video), but it’s a very rare occurrence.  
> \- The gifts they buy are all ones on the Japanese Garden’s website, excluding the parasol. I am pretty sure the bottle is supposed to be for perfume.  
> \- It wasn’t until they got to the teahouse that I remembered they went to Osaka before LA, ooopssss.  
> \- For anyone curious, flowers for success, happiness and first love are (in order); yellow poppy, holly (for domestic happiness, good job noods), red AND yellow roses together or gardenia (both meaning joy), and purple lilac.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	19. Native in my Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not often that Russel asks Murdoc for advice, and so they sit and talk. [Phase 1]

Murdoc looks particularly craggy when he comes stumbling into the kitchen. With his hair curling away from his face, the scar on his brow is on show, and looking particularly red, a sure sign he’s been sick at some point the last hour or so, and he blinks stupidly when it occurs, some seconds after arriving in the middle of the room, that there is a light on when he was not the one responsible for such a thing.

‘Oh,’ he says, as his bleary, bulb-blinded eyes settle on Russel, sat at the table and still holding his pen over the crossword he’d been doing, ‘hello.’

‘Hello,’ Russel replies without even so much as a twitch of his lips into anything even resembling a smile. ‘Can’t sleep?’

‘It’s those fuckin’ crows, y’know?’ Murdoc grouses, and goes padding past to get to the kettle. ‘Noisy fuckers, cawing right outside my bed. Must be a nest in the car park somewhere.’

‘Boiled it not long ago,’ Russel offers, head lowering to look at the crossword again. ‘Shouldn’t take too long.’

‘Satan curse it,’ Murdoc replies, but the silence hung for a second too long, and Russel is positive he’d been about to say “God bless it” instead. Poor chap must be more exhausted than he looks.

Whilst Murdoc clatters about behind him looking for a clean mug (of which there are plenty, he’s just still not over Russel throwing his favourite mug at him and shattering it into pieces some weeks ago) and tea bags, Russel glances back to watch him. His T-shirt is clinging in a darkened V down his back, his skin sickly-flushed, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to ask if he’s coming down with something.

‘What did you drink?’ he asks, because that is safer.

‘I didn’t,’ Murdoc sighs. ‘Apparently my stomach cannot handle an amount of _Dairy Milk Caramel_ commonly described as “copious.” Who knew?’

 ‘You made yourself sick by eating too much chocolate?’ Russel asks. For confirmation. Because it sounds like that is what Murdoc just said, but he wants to make sure.

‘There _was_ some alcohol involved, but yes,’ Murdoc grunts, and throws a tea bag at the back of his head. It hits, but it’s a tea bag, it doesn’t hurt. ‘Don’t tell Noodle.’

‘I’m telling Noodle.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

This goes on for several more volleys before Murdoc finally says, without any of the vitriol that would normally accompany it, ‘you’re such an arsehole.’

Russel doesn’t deny it.

The kettle pops, and there’s the bang-crash-wallop of Murdoc fucking about making tea as noisily as he possibly can. Russel’s eyes roll heavenward, and then a mug is slammed onto the table next to him.

‘What’s that?’ Russel asks, giving it some side-eye.

‘Coffee. Fuckin’ Yanks don’t know a good drink if it burnt your dick off.’

Russel considers making a joke about dumping it in the harbour, but he can’t think of one quickly enough. It’s gone two; it’s far too late-early to be thinking about things like historical tea jokes. So instead, he says Thank You, and Murdoc flops, graceless and yet grace _ful_ at the same time, into a chair across from him, tea cradled in his hands. Russel envies that about him, and 2D too; the effortless way they manage to fling their limbs in every which direction without a care to the world around them and still end up exactly where they intended without a hair out of place. Granted, neither of them had a hair _in_ place to begin with, but the point stood that their ragdoll-like disregard for their bodies was incredibly enviable. It was something Russel, a gentle giant since that day in the school with the concerned faces of the nurse and the headmaster and the priest brought in to bring him under control, had never had and coveted more than anything.

‘Why you awake, anyway?’ the bassist grunts, and Russel looks at the crossword.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he says, quiet. ‘I was – I was thinking about Del again.’

When isn’t he thinking about Del is an appropriate question for Murdoc to ask, but he hums quietly, looks off into the middle distance. Russel watches him watching nothing, and they sit there in silence for some minutes.

‘You loved him,’ Murdoc says, and it’s not a question.

There’s not a trace of judgement in his tone, and that surprises Russel more than his own utter transparency. Murdoc is the most judgemental arsehole to have ever graced God’s green earth, and yet he says it so blandly, as if relaying the weather, or the football results.

‘Yeah,’ Russel sighs, ‘I did. Soulmates, you know?’

‘Religion in the family?’

‘Not really. Del went to Sunday school for a while, did Church twice a week, said grace, that kind of thing. He’d lapsed by the time I met him, though.’

Murdoc hums some more, contemplative. ‘I see,’ he says, though he says it like he’s not listening in the least. Russel knows him too well; Murdoc cannot keep himself from creating files in his head of every little thing people say to him. In another life, he’d have made a great therapist.

Great is a generous word for a man that chose a life of Devil worship and thinks the height of entertainment is watching 2D generally flail about in day-to-day life, but this is, after all, another life.

Even greatness could be ascribed to Murdoc in another life.

For several minutes after that, they sit in silence and drink. Murdoc, just to be an ass, Russel is sure, slurps his tea, and Russel finds that the break in the silence is actually rather nice, if irritating.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he admits, when the silence has dragged too long.

It’s like Murdoc was waiting for him to crack, and maybe he actually was. He likes to pretend he’s enigmatic, but really he’s just batshit insane at the best of times. He twists in his seat to face Russel fully, leans his weight on an elbow on the table, and stares at him. Russel is no more off-put than when Murdoc stares at anyone or anything.

‘What do you _want_ to do?’ the bassist asks, and that’s such a loaded question.

Russel considers it.

‘No,’ Murdoc says, when he takes more than ten seconds to answer. ‘Don’t think about it, don’t tell me what you think you _should_ say. Tell me what you _want_.’

‘I want him back.’

It comes out angry, bitter, hurt. It comes out with such force that it hurts his teeth, and he sits there staring into his almost-empty mug. His breath shakes, his hands shake. Murdoc smiles, and it’s like the smile he gives Noodle, the softer one, but this is full of – of – not pity, because Murdoc doesn’t _understand_ pity, but it’s close.

‘I know,’ he says, gentle. His fingers stretch, his weight shifts, but he changes his mind at the last second and doesn’t reach over.

When Russel chances a glance up, Murdoc’s eyes are fixed on him, without any of the anger or bitterness or any of the negativity that usually accompanies a stare. His eyes are browner, almost, as if the Hell behind them has receded for now, given way to the man that lurks beneath the wall of flames. But then he blinks, and the flames are back, red-hot and searing as they lock gazes.

‘I love him so fucking much,’ Russel whispers, and Murdoc _does_ reach out at that, fingers like tea-hot china again his wrist. It’s a brief touch, barely moments, but it’s there, and it grounds him.

He hadn’t even noticed he was slipping, but he’s grounded again now.

For a moment, Murdoc is quiet; his lips are parted just so, as if there are words half-formed on them, caught somewhere between tongue and teeth. Russel waits.

‘After this album, I think you should. You need to get him out of you. Exorcise him.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Russel says, because the thought makes him feel physically sick.

‘You can’t live like this.’

‘You do.’

Murdoc’s smile is bitter now, that angry little curl of lips that almost shows just how _much_ hatred crawls through his veins. Russel has seen him break before, seen beneath the flames, and beneath the man to the scared boy with the pus-filled welts on the back of his legs, has seen him wail and scream and held him as he throws himself into a fray that doesn’t exist.

‘I made my bed,’ he says, ‘I chose to make the deal, and when they come for me, I’m – I’m ready for that, yeah? Done my crime, eventually I’ll have to do the time. I don’t have a choice now. You do.’

Russel wants to ask if he can bargain for his soul back, but too many things have been done now.

‘It doesn’t feel like it.’

‘It never does.’

They both pause; the sentence hangs unfinished between them, an admission not even Russel can pull from behind his teeth with all the other words he can’t bring himself to say, but the silence remains strong.

‘Have you ever been in love?’ Russel asks, because it’s what he was about to admit, and it’s not an admission if you’re answering a question.

‘No,’ Murdoc says.

For a man that lies on a day-to-day basis, the raw twist of his mouth is the most obvious it’s ever been.

‘You’re such a liar, Niccals,’ Russel tells him.

‘I don’t think I can. I don’t have a soul anymore, do I? Haven’t had one since I was, what, sixteen? I don’t think it would matter anyway,’ he says, with a shrug so idle it’s forced, ‘I don’t think love’s the thing for me. All that – that – well, you know how it is.’

He waves a hand as if to dismiss the thought from his general vicinity, waving it back to Russel, who does know how it is.

‘Yeah,’ the drummer sighs, ‘yeah, I guess so.’

Silence reigns supreme again. Russel stares at his crossword even though he’s not seeing the words anymore, and Murdoc thumbs a streak of tea from the side of his mug.

‘It must have been nice,’ Murdoc say eventually, barely more than a whisper. Russel almost doesn’t hear him, and for a second, wonders if he was supposed to.

‘Hm?’

Murdoc doesn’t flinch so much as he blinks, and he pushes his chair out a little to fold his arms on the table and rest his chin on them.

‘Love,’ he says, ‘being in love. Del, I guess. It must have been nice while it lasted.’

Russel smiles, and sighs that wistful, longing sigh Murdoc has heard a thousand times over. Even though the sound is cliché, Russel doesn’t care. All those months ago, years, even, Del had felt like a cliché, a thousand suns burning whisper-hot against his heart.

‘Yeah,’ he says, his smile curving the word into something reverential, something beautiful. ‘Yeah, it was real nice.’ He gives Murdoc, who is staring at the wall again, jaw jutted in morose contemplation, a sly little look before adding, ‘and the sex was fantastic.’

The reaction is immediate; Murdoc rears back in his chair and makes overwrought gagging noises, dipping a finger into his tea to flick it at him. Russel laughs, and dusts the flecks of dirty leaf-water from his jersey. They grin at each other, or rather, Russel grins, and Murdoc threatens violence with his wicked little smile, but the moment breaks and Murdoc settles back into his folded-arm pillow, and Russel looks at his crossword. Silence reigns again, and the darkness creeps back in like a scolded dog.

‘It sounds nice,’ Murdoc repeats, and Russel spares him a glance.

Whatever joviality they’d had a few minutes prior is totally gone now, and Russel feels the burn of Del’s suns searing nerve and bone and bloodstream, burning him from the inside out with the sickly-sour thought of losing him forever.

Out in the hall, a cuckoo clock they bought on a joke and Russel reconfigured to have Pazuzu’s head chimes the hour.

Murdoc counts the coos off with taps of his nails against the tabletop.

‘Three o’clock,’ he sighs, and pops his neck. ‘Time passes so weirdly here, have you noticed? Feels like we’ve been here forever, but it goes by so quickly it’s barely any time at all.’

‘I think that’s your old age creeping up on you,’ Russel tells him, a desperate, clawing attempt to bring the mood up before it permeates the walls and stains them black.

There’s a breathy little chuckle from Murdoc’s general direction, but he doesn’t reply, and they sit in silence for the rest of the pre-dawn darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Rhinestone Eyes.  
> \- So i aro Murdoc canon yet or wot  
> \- Russ/Del OTP tbh.  
> \- Pazuzu is the demon (statue) that Murdoc adores so and you see him in the Slowboat to Hades poster and in the Rock It video.  
> \- Ha, oh man, this gave me the feelsies.  
> \- There’s going to be more Russel in the next few chapters, because I totalled up the character count, and Murdoc’s only not been in like 3 chapters and Russ has barely been in any comparatively, so I need to change that up a bit.  
> \- Don’t suppose anyone wants to review or anything lm a o  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	20. Picture I'm a Dreamer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crows are cawing again and Noodle can’t sleep. [Phase 1]

The crows are cawing again, and Noodle can’t sleep. She’s been trying for hours, her eyelids tugging, gritty and sore and it feels like every eyelash is poking directly into her corneas, but still sleep does not claim her. She stares at the ceiling, waiting, waiting, waiting, and the crows continue to caw. What have they found that’s so interesting out there? It must be something great, else they’d never make such a racket. Maybe she should poke her head out of the window and have a look, see if it’s more interesting than the mind-numbing slats of dusty light coming through the blinds picking out the flock on the ceiling wallpaper.

A rumble of earth, deep beneath her; more zombies on the prowl, undoubtedly trying to break out of the cellar, pawing at the door that they can’t seem to get a handle on. She’ll have to deal with them if the morning doesn’t get them first. When even _is_ morning?

01:34 am.

Of course it is. How long has she been in bed? Three, maybe four hours? She’d been – she’d been sleepy whilst they were in the studio, fingers slow over the strings. 2D had brought her to bed, and she rolls over, face pressing just so into the pillow and getting a gentle curl of butterscotch and cigarettes and the smell of his medicine brushing over her like his fingers in her hair.

She sighs, content, eyelids shutting slow, slow, slow.

A crow caws directly outside her window, and she bolts upright with a gasp.

Cursing quietly to herself, she swings her legs out of bed, and is about to pull her slippers on when 2D’s shout echoes down the corridor.

‘ _Murdoc_!’

He sounds _worried_ , scared even, and Noodle is on her feet in an instant, slippers forgotten, rushing to the door and throwing it open to peer around. 2D is outside Murdoc’s door, back pressed to the wall, white as a sheet. He’s trembling, barely on his feet, and Noodle almost stumbles into the wall in her haste to run to him. It occurs, vaguely, that he’s lit mostly by light coming from Murdoc’s open door, and that is the scariest part of it; light _never_ comes from Murdoc’s room, not at night.

‘Chee!’ she calls, and he looks at her, black eyes so wide.

‘No!’ he yells, throws a hand up to stop her, ‘no, don’t!’

But it’s too late; she’s already barrelling into his legs, using him to stop herself, and looking into the open door of Murdoc’s room.

She’s never seen his room in daylight, but she’s familiar with it like this, moonlight picking out stained paper, cracked plaster, twisted sheets. The window is thrown wide open, no, no it’s broken, the glass shattered inward – how hadn’t she _heard_ it? It must have been an enormous blow to strew the floor with shards of glass – and her fingers clutch tight at the leg of 2D’s pyjamas.

‘What is that?’ she breathes, and 2D’s fingers curl tight into the back of her top, as if to keep her close.

Murdoc is clearly in _pain_ , but he’s absolutely trapped. There is _nothing_ he can do. Noodle has never seen him helpless before; she’s seen him so drunk he can’t stand without something to support him, seen him blind with rage, watched him throw up and moan like he’s about to die, but he’s never once not been in control. She’s never heard him howl in agony before, and it sets her heart to a pace it’s never gone. She doesn’t know what to do, but she knows, in her gut, if she doesn’t do _something_ , she’s going to lose him forever.

So she does the first thing that comes to mind; she tears out of 2D’s grip, dashes the ten feet between the corridor and the bottom of Murdoc’s bed, and pushes with her legs, kicking the – the – the – _thing_ in the back of the head and knocking it into the wall.

It rounds on her, fangs and eyes the colour of Hell as Noodle crashes to the floor, but she’s met Murdoc’s gaze for too long now, and seeing Hell holds no fear.

‘Go,’ she spits, and clenches her fists as she scrambles to her feet.

Like most things, the demon is twice her size, but it still seems to consider her a valid threat, getting nose-to-nose with her. The noise of the world fades – Murdoc wheezing and choking out her name, 2D calling for her, yelling for Russel, Russel’s heavy footsteps – and all she can hear is the racket of her heart in her ears, her breathing hard on her tongue, the monster’s clicking bones and teeth and claws so very close to her flesh.

‘Leave,’ she tells it, and points at the window.

Her hand shakes, pulse bright in her wrist.

The monster leers, leans closer.

Behind it, Murdoc has most of his breath back, is shoving himself upright. Noodle tries not to watch him, but her gaze flickers.

He does not move as fast as the monster does, but Noodle moves faster still, cracking her knuckles into the underside of its bony jaw as it turns with all the force she can muster.

‘Stay back!’ she yells, as the monster reels, clutching at its broken maw, cursing in a language she doesn’t know. ‘Go! Go! Leave!’

Murdoc’s eye flares redder than ever, a fire burning from somewhere she cannot reach, and she can’t see much of him behind the monster, but he must be doing something, because it rounds on him with an ear-shattering screech.

‘Sorry, love,’ he slurs, and Noodle can hear the grin on his bleeding mouth, ‘you’re not getting me tonight.’

The monster screeches some more, and its tail whips before it disappears in a cloud of smoke.

As soon as the smoke has dissipated, Murdoc is collapsing on the bed, looking exhausted.

‘Fuck me,’ he wheezes, and Noodle rushes to clamber up beside him.

The bed reeks of sex and blood and sulphur, but she doesn’t care, burying her face in Murdoc’s sweaty neck and holding him as tight as she dares. His mouth is bleeding, his nose too, claw marks on his chest raking deep through the hair and her fingers have to stretch to fit all of them, but he gasps, snarls high in his throat and grabs her wrist when she touches the raw skin. She mumbles an apology into his jugular, and goes still against him. There are bruises forming on his neck already, long, spindly bruises, chocolate wrappers in the shape of the monster’s hands. It doesn’t even really register to her that he’s almost naked, had been bare to her gaze when she barged in, because that is not what’s important right now.

2D hovers at the doorway, staring wide-eyed at them both.

‘What was that?’ he asks, voice pitching higher than normal.

Noodle glances up; Russel is stood there. How long’s he been stood there? He’s half-dressed and looking more stressed than she’s ever seen him.

‘Are you done screaming?’ he asks, though it looks like he wants to ask something else.

Murdoc pets Noodle’s hair, and she feels his heartbeat begin to slow, muscles relaxing under her weight as she shifts it further over him, a heavy blanket of small girl and sleepless terror and adrenaline.

‘Succubus,’ he says, idle, attention firmly on her. She watches the flames in his eyes burn down to embers, to ash, ‘happens sometimes.’

‘Succubus,’ Russel repeats, eyes narrowed, voice droll. He looks like he wants to punch Murdoc in the nose. He looks like that so often that Noodle almost doesn’t notice the expression at all. ‘As in sexy-lady-killing-you-with-sex succubus?’

‘Not so much sexy lady as spawn of the devil,’ Murdoc replies with a snort. He makes a pained sort of noise, and scrubs an arm under his nose, wiping the blood away.

Noodle grumbles, slips off of his chest proper to wedge herself into his side.

‘I owe you one, Dents,’ he adds after a moment. ‘Could have been a goner then if you hadn’t screamed the house down.’

2D does not look relieved by this admission. If anything, he looks more upset.

‘Right,’ Russel says, extends a hand as if to wave everyone down, though the only tension is what he’s got in his shoulders, ‘right. Okay. _What_ , exactly, just happened? It’s all been incoherent screaming and it _stinks_ of se – well, actually, now it just stinks of sulphur.’

Murdoc grins that lazy, aching grin he gets sometimes, and does his best to explain. ‘Succubus appeared, starting doing her thing, you know how that is, you’ve read a book. Dent-face shows up, letting himself in – ‘

‘I had a nightmare,’ 2D mumbles, picks at his nails. ‘’Cause of the crows. Was gonna talk to you.’

‘Mm. Well, whatever, he shows up, and starts screaming. Noodle appears out of fucking nowhere, kicking the succubus in the back of the head and breaking, um. Contact.’

Russel hums, and Noodle nods, really rather proud of herself. She almost headbutts Murdoc in the chin, and he puts a hand on top of her head to stop her throwing it around so willy-nilly.

‘Succubus rounds on her, she tells it to fuck off. It doesn’t, so she punches it in the face, and I get enough of – of – of _me_ back to send it back to Hell.’

‘Send it back?’ 2D asks, slow, frowning.

‘Seals,’ Murdoc replies, and makes a few hand gestures that Noodle doesn’t see. ‘Any good Satanist knows how to make some shitty hand-signs like in that cartoon Noods watches. The one with the orange kid.’

‘ _Naruto_ ,’ 2D offers, and Noodle perks up at that.

 Murdoc’s fingers run thunder-hot through her hair, rub absently at the shell of her ear. In later years, she will come to the conclusion that the warmth and contentment that floods her at such a simple, inattentive action is the kind of feeling that makes dogs wag their tails.

‘Are you going to stay there all night?’ he asks, and she hums, makes no move to _move_. ‘I see.’

The other two linger in the doorway.

‘Do you want to get those scratches cleaned up?’ Russel asks, in the kind of tone that isn’t so much a question as it is a thinly-veiled threat.

Murdoc, for once totally innocent for his part, cannot think of a threat worth making.

‘Noodle doesn’t want to move,’ he tries, using her as a shield. She’s happy to fill that role, and holds him as tight as she dares. ‘And for that matter, neither do I. I’m dying over here.’

Noodle and 2D both snap to attention. Murdoc gives them both a droll look.

‘Figuratively,’ he says, ‘I’m not being serious.’

But both of them already have his hands in theirs and are tugging him to his feet to shove him in the direction of the bathroom. Groaning all the way, huffing and puffing like an asthmatic canine, he shuts the door and after a moment, they hear the clang and clatter and plastic click of the cabinets opening and closing, and then the creak of the pipes as the water turns on.

Satisfied, Russel stoops to open his arms and heft Noodle into them. She smells of Murdoc’s blood, the sulphur and sex and sweat of his bed, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care. She’s starting to tremble a little, and Russel presses his mouth to her crown, shifts on his feet. It’s not quite a rocking motion, but it’s something he knows calms her down. She’s ten, he knows, she doesn’t need babying, but sometimes, sometimes life has a way of getting in the way.

‘I, um,’ 2D starts, ‘I’ll stay too. If you wanna. Go back to bed.’

Russel glances at him, and then at Noodle. She is slowly relaxing, adrenaline leaving her in a rush; she looks exhausted now, as though she wasn’t tired before.

Poor girl, he thinks.

It doesn’t take long for Murdoc to clean up; when he leaves the bathroom, steaming and dressed in the same briefs he entered in, hair towel-dried and curling errantly, he’s got clean wounds, and they already seem to be mostly healed over. Russel decides that half-past one in the morning is not the time to start a debate about Murdoc’s ability to heal wounds versus the reality that he’s exhausted versus some demonic shenanigans they clearly need to discuss, and passes the sleepily-grasping Noodle over to him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Murdoc says, when he sees Russel’s expression, settling Noodle against his side with his chin on her crown, ‘that succubus won’t be back for a while. They always take a week or so to recuperate. She’ll be safe with me, at least for tonight. Right, dent-face, in you get if you’re staying.’

2D hurries to comply, all but leaping into Murdoc’s bed with the bed’s owner trailing along behind him, kicking the door shut with his heel. It takes some effort to get Noodle to let go of him long enough to pin a sheet to the window to keep the breeze and the morning-to-come out, but he’s quick to return to bed, clambering over 2D’s hip to wedge himself between the two as is their norm. Noodle snuggles up easily, slotting perfectly into place, and Murdoc does not miss the particular force she applies when she jams her ear against his heart. 2D’s elbow digs into his hip as his arm wraps around them both, and the boy is the first to go.

For another hour or so, Murdoc and Noodle lie awake, breathing stilted, and ears pricked. Though neither say a word, they both listen to the other, hear all they have to say in that soft snoring silence. Noodle listens to the rhythm of Murdoc’s heart, the occasional skip of a beat, the occasional sharp breath, and eventually he falls asleep, breath ruffling her hair.

2D’s hand clutches periodically at the back of her shirt, as if to make sure that it’s there, and she worms a foot between Murdoc’s knees to get at 2D’s leg and kick it to make him stop. Murdoc grumbles, and his leg hitches over hers, pins her down to stop her fidgeting. This is fine, she thinks, because Murdoc is hot and heavy and smells, for once, like soap, and it’s nice knowing that he’s so obviously _there_. There’s no room for anything else when they’re squashed into a single bed like this. He seems to be sleeping alright; his heart is steady against her ear, his breathing regular, and he’s not doing that weird twitchy thing he does sometimes, when he’s deep enough under to dream, but gets a nightmare instead. He gets nightmares a lot.

If she’s honest with herself, she isn’t surprised in the least. She’d have nightmares too, if she woke up and found that thing pinning her to her bed.

She shivers. 2D’s hand digs under her side as if to draw her closer, but it’s Murdoc that actually tugs her in. For too long, she lies there in silence, eyes shut and waiting, waiting, waiting.

 The crows are cawing again, and Noodle can’t sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Every Planet we Reach is Dead.  
> \- It says something that Russel is so used to everybody screaming and shouting that he waits to be be called before getting involved.  
> \- Murdoc’s neck bruises being chocolate wrappers are a nod to Cadbury’s caramel dairy milk, the wrapper of which is purple and yellow.  
> \- Before media got hold of it, succubi looked like actual demons, rather than sexy ladies. I’m sure Murdoc likes them all the same.  
> \- Headcanon that 2D and Noodle race with the Naruto run down the corridors.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	21. You're by my Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle holds Russel’s hand not because she needs it, because she doesn’t, not any more. She holds it because he does. [Phase 2]

Sometimes, there are moments where his fingers itch and he can’t balance his sticks on his fingertips the way he could in that vague, hazy before time, before this, whatever this is. Before medication and alcohol and cigarettes passed to him by Murdoc’s crooked fingers that he’s sure are less tobacco than he pretends. Before the grim reaper, before the basement, before the split that tore him apart more than he thought possible. Losing the band had hurt – but he hadn’t lost them, not really.

They’d all lost themselves, in the end.

Being back at Kong is – is –

An adventure.

Noodle tells them that over the last six months or so, she’s been working on making the studio habitable again, but Russel can smell death in every room, the shit and piss stench of rotting meat and dirt that lingers in the carpet pile and behind the nicotine-stained wallpaper. He mentions the shifting shadows he finds there to Murdoc, because Murdoc is generally behind any abnormal shenanigans in Kong, summoning demons and monsters and creatures from Below to help protect their home against intruders, but the Satanist, looking craggier and older and sicker for his time in jail, just looks at him with something that, on a favourable day, Russel might compare to concern.

‘You what, mate?’ Murdoc asks him, and Russel shakes his head, retreats to the relative safety of the kitchen.

Noodle invariable finds him there some hours later, up to his elbows in washing-up, with a pile of freshly-baked breads and cakes on stacking cooling racks beside him.

‘Are you alright?’ she asks, and she doesn’t need the stool to get to the draining board any more.

He marvels at this, as she dries up a set of mixing bowls in no time at all. She’s grown a couple of feet in the time they’ve been apart, and how long has that been, anyway? He doesn’t really remember when they parted, when they reunited. Ike said that he’d talked to a photo of her in his wallet a lot. Maybe those are the conversations he remembers, her beaming faced creased and worn with the special kind of age that comes from being in a wallet stuffed full of old bus tickets and unused loyalty cards. She looks so much older than all that now, but she still has the puppy-fat roundness to her cheeks that make her smiles so sugar-spice.

‘I’m alright,’ he assures her, quiet, rinses off a spoon to drop it into the cutlery strainer and start on a whisk. ‘Just. Tired.’

‘Yeah,’ she sighs, and when he glances at her, her eyes are downcast, lids sparkling with creased green glitter. ‘Yeah, me too. I think we’re all a bit tired. It’s been a long couple of years, you know?’

He does know.

‘And there are still zombies everywhere. It’s hard to sleep when you can hear them in the crawlspaces.’

He nods, and puts the whisk on the draining board. She continues to babble, and he continues to nod and hum and mumble agreements in that quiet, complacent way of his, and she pauses occasionally, frowns up at him. He gives her shaky smiles that don’t work any more than 2D’s do, but she accepts it anyway, because he has nothing else to give.

When the clean-up from Russel’s compulsive, antsy baking session is finished, he puts the Victoria sponges together, one with strawberry jam, the other with handmade chocolate cream, cuts the wings for the butterfly cakes and makes the icing, and Noodle perches on the counter beside him, watching him work and licking the bowls when he’s done.

‘It’s bad for you,’ he tells her, and she shrugs.

‘Better for me than the all the cigarettes and drugs.’

She has a point.

‘Medicines.’

‘I’ve seen the things Murdoc brings home,’ she tells him. ‘We – I tried so hard, you know? To get you all off all that stuff.’

He hadn’t realised, all those years ago, that it had affected her so poorly. He should have known better, should have seen the way she watched them with their cigarettes and their bottles and their –

 ‘I’m sorry,’ he says with a sigh, looks at her sat there in her T-shirt and shorts and long socks, hair flyaway and untamed from whatever she’d been up to before coming to find him. ‘I – I’ll do something about it.’

She smiles, reaches over to touch his grizzled cheek.

‘You’re alright,’ she tells him, and he wonders how much it showed that he needed to hear it.

His sigh ruffles her fringe, brushes it back from her eyes, and she wrinkles her nose.

‘Take some cake,’ Russel says, and steps out of her arm’s reach.

His fingers are shaking.

Noodle watches him, and for a second, he wavers, but then he steadies himself against the tide of – of – of whatever it is sweeping over him, the waves deafeningly loud overhead and underfoot, and she’s taking a couple of fairy cakes and disappearing with a promise of bringing him the sheet music for one of the songs.

Quietly, Russel puts the kettle on, drops into a chair and pulls his Lexotan from his pocket, swallows two dry. By the time Murdoc comes in, empty mugs looped over every finger, his hands have stopped shaking, and he leaves, heading to his room, where half-finished taxidermy projects wait for him.

A few days later, when he realises that he hasn’t left his room for days, he finds Noodle in the kitchen, looking morose and eating crisps.

‘Are you alright?’ he asks. He remembers years ago, when she was nine and they were recording the album and she’d sat shoving her face full of junk food for only a couple of reasons. She’s older now, though, those reasons must differ somewhat.

‘Cramps,’ she replies, and shoves another handful of Monster Munch in her mouth.

He goes straight to the crisps in front of her and snatches them out of her hand.

‘Hey!’

He ruffles her hair, dumps the crisps on the side, and goes to the fridge, pulling out grapes and putting those in front of her instead.

‘Junk food makes your cramps worse,’ he tells her, and she looks at him. ‘Del had – _has_ – a sister. Learnt a lot from her, growing up.’

She considers this, and turns to morosely eating grapes.

‘Growing up is a pain,’ she tells him, and picks a bit of grape skin from between her teeth, grumbling about that too. ‘Cramps are a pain.’

She judges him and then says, ‘I’ll take uncontrollable erections over periods any day.’

He freezes, and looks at her. She beams at him. He slowly begins to laugh, and then he has to sit down because his chest hurts. His heart.

When he’s recovered – and he’s not sure he’s going to recover from hearing Noodle say the word “erection” any time soon – she grins some more, and offers him some grapes.

They sit there for some time, eating grapes and shooting the breeze, talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes, Noodle asks a question about Del, or about Brooklyn, about a time before her, when she was still in the labs at Osaka, a time long before Murdoc put an ad in the paper for a guitarist with a GSOH, and sometimes, Russel answers. Sometimes his hands shake, and he reaches reflexively for his pills, but then he looks at Noodle, who is looking at him so softly, with such a gentle smile, and her hands close over his, hold tight.

He doesn’t need the pills, except he does, has already developed a dependence that will not be easily shaken. He knows that she will talk to Murdoc about it, because Murdoc brute-forced his way out of addiction, clinging to her hands the way Russel is now clinging to them, and Murdoc is, so he claims, in the process of brute-forcing 2D out of an addiction to his painkillers. It’s not working, because the boy eats them like tic tacs, but he’s trying. She’ll talk to Murdoc about it, and Murdoc will find him at two in the morning with tremors from fingertip to fingertip, and he’ll shove his head down the toilet, or something equally ridiculous and unhelpful.

(In truth, if Russel were to ask, Murdoc would sit up with him night after night and talk it out, listen when he needed to, and say not a word more than necessary. He would do all he could to help Russel out, because he’s been there, has Murdoc, he knows what it’s like. But Russel doesn’t ask, so Murdoc doesn’t sit there with a mug in one hand and cigarette in the other, both of them looking too old for the world threatening to swallow them whole.)

‘Russel,’ she starts, and then stops, looks at their hands, the bearish paws swamping her own, dainty little hands with chipped nail polish and string blisters. ‘I – I want to help.’

He doesn’t think she can, but he can’t bring himself to say that.

‘I’ll be okay,’ he says instead, and she looks at him like she doesn’t quite believe him.

Honestly, he wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t – he doesn’t believe himself at all.

‘It’ll take time,’ he says, and there, that sounds a little more like him, a little less marionette, ‘I was – I was in a dark place. I still am. But I’ll be okay.’

Her eyes narrow, a barely-noticeable twitch of her lids, and then she takes a breath, squeezes his hands. When he meets her eyes, she smiles up at him, and shoves up to lean over the table and kiss his cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from To Binge.  
> \- Was that a Yellow Wallpaper shout-out?  
> \- Russel is canonically on anti-anxiety meds as of phase 2 (Lexotan is mentioned in RotO on page 161. It’s a type of benzo) and is popping them pretty regular.  
> \- Also in the hiatus-phase 2 crossover point, his beard was white and grizzly. He looks so old for being like 30 ish, it’s very disheartening. My poor son.  
> \- With any luck, I’ll hit chapter 23 on 23rd May, so expect birthday shenanigans????  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	22. It's a Casio on a Plastic Beach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beneath the facade, all they are is musicians. [Phase 2]

Murdoc hasn’t seen 2D for several hours; granted, those hours are because he’s been asleep face-first in his bed and pretending like the universe doesn’t exist. It was a safer bet than the alternative, which was throw up and hate said universe. Pretending things he hates don’t exist is probably better for his health, all things considered. Not seeing 2D is not usually a cause for concern, and truthfully, even now it’s not, it barely even registers until he’s in the kitchen making a cup of tea and 2D, who is normally lurking around the kitchen with burnt toast and painkillers at this time of day, is nowhere to be seen. Then, because apparently, over the years of their acquaintance, Murdoc has become a lost puppy, he goes off in search of his frankly errant singer.

He finds him in the music room, tapping out some classical piece Murdoc half-remembers hearing on endless repeat during Stu-Pot’s post-coma recovery, in the interim between Stu-Pot and 2D. Intermission music, really.

‘Do you have to stare?’ 2D asks, and Murdoc blinks, almost taking a half-step back.

‘Yes,’ he says, when he’s shaken the glee in 2D’s tone off.

The boy’s genuinely happy, genuinely enjoying himself, and he almost doesn’t want to take it from him.

‘Having fun?’ he asks, and approaches.

‘Yeah,’ 2D grins, ‘and my wrist doesn’t hurt at all!’

 Murdoc vaguely recalls 2D falling face-first off a step and landing hard on his wrist, spraining it. He’d patched it up, put it in a compression bandage and told him to baby it for a few days, but he’s at least eighty percent sure that his advice went ignored. Still, can’t blame him for it, he does need his wrist.

‘Only because you’re using your wanking hand,’ Murdoc snorts, and flicks his arm. ‘Budge over.’

2D gives him a look, because the hand he’s leading with is not the point at all, but keeps playing, even as he lifts himself up the two or so inches he needs to get to the other end of the stool and give Murdoc enough room. Both of them situated, bent to avoid rubbing shoulders, though their hips are pressed, Murdoc watches 2D’s hands for another few moments before slipping his in between and filling the gaps in the melody without a hesitation.

After a wrong note, 2D starts laughing, and moves his arm to give Murdoc’s more space. Without exchanging a word, they swap hands to play half of the other’s tune.

There isn’t any sheet music, but they don’t go wrong on a tune neither of them really knows. It’s just instinctual, for the most part, a knowledge of what music is, what notes sound like, and it’s the only time Murdoc’s ever seen 2D’s brain work faster than a drunken crawl, let alone faster than his. But here he is, actually having to exert some form of _effort_ to keep up with the boy’s hands.

Murdoc watches him from the corner of his eye as they play, switching from ragtime to ballad to something that sounds vaguely gospel, a hymn for a God Murdoc denies with every ounce of his rotting corpse, and feels warmth at the grin on the sod’s face. He looks genuinely happy to be making up unoriginal, mediocre pieces that will never get recorded, or remembered once they leave the room, and his smile is infectious. Murdoc grins too, turns his gaze back to the piano before them.

They play until his wrists ache, until the joints in his fingertips burn for the pressure of the hard-hitting notes. 2D is laughing outright now, his shoulder bumping Murdoc’s as he gets enthusiastic, but he’s unapologetic about it, and that’s what Murdoc wants from him. That lack of apology, that lack of reverence for the ground he walks on. If Murdoc was ever a saint, he’s long since fallen and become something much worse. Grigori at least had their feet beneath them, but Murdoc had not fallen, he’d plummeted.

Piece rounding itself off really rather nicely, Murdoc’s hands slip away from the keys, sets them in his lap, lets 2D take over once more. The singer spares him a glance, but Murdoc just inclines his head, and 2D beams, shoulders straightening. He’s careful not to elbow Murdoc in the chest, but he throws his entire body into it, every pound and gram and atom of his being pushed entirely into the tips of his fingers as they flutter and flicker and dance across the keys.

By no means is Murdoc a bad pianist, he’s been playing almost as long as he’s played bass, and he knows his way around a keyboard better than he knows his way around other instruments, but 2D was _made_ for piano. He’s absolutely perfect, and he shoots another beaming, toothless grin Murdoc’s way as the tune slips effortlessly back into duet form.

‘You cheeky fucker,’ he laughs, but obligingly cracks his fingers to get them up on the ivories again.

‘You’re here,’ 2D replies, with a not-subtle nudge of the elbow, ‘might as well get some use out of you.’

‘You’re making me play Britney,’ Murdoc reminds him, as though there could be any possibility of forgetting, ‘you might want to keep me playing if you don’t want to die.’

2D, so positive of Murdoc actually enjoying himself and the probability of being killed for this at an all-time low of precisely zero percent, just throws his head back and starts singing along at the top of his lungs. He even deliberately hits all the high notes, just to be a piece of shit.

He’s not sure what he enjoys most; that Murdoc knows Britney Spears well enough to play the vocals without sheet music, or that Murdoc is enjoying himself, or that Murdoc is mouthing the words as he plays, and from the looks of it knows every word as well as he knows every note.

Honestly, he’s just a little bit in awe of how _handsome_ Murdoc looks in that moment, the wear and tear of thirty-eight hard years dropping at least ten of them from his shoulders and leaving him with laughter lines and a five o’clock shadow the same raven black as his hair. He must feel 2D looking at him, because his gaze slides over, red eye blazing bright, and his lips curl, the faintest hint of crooked canine and a promise of trouble.

2D feels his stomach tighten, and he turns his head to look at the keys his fingers are still moving unthinkingly, effortlessly, over, knowing them as well as Murdoc’s know strings.

The piece comes to an end, and Murdoc, once again, pulls his hands away to let 2D take over, content to watch once more. It doesn’t last long, 2D’s wrists starting to cramp up, and his shoulders aching, and he trails off after a few minutes more, and the music room falls silent.

Murdoc fishes in his pocket for his cigarettes and lighter, and offers one to 2D, who accepts it with red fingers.

‘This was fun,’ 2D says, quiet, ‘I really enjoyed it. I missed playing with you a lot.’

Murdoc snorts, almost chokes on a mouthful of smoke.

‘You did, huh?’ he teases, but 2D looks a bit blank, so he lets it go. ‘I enjoyed it too. Couldn’t exactly play in jail, you know?’

2D doesn’t know, but he admits that he can imagine, and they sit there quietly. When the cigarettes are smoked, stubbed out in the overflowing ashtray, Murdoc gets to his feet.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I only came by to see where you were. Don’t strain that wrist too much more today; we’ll need it for practice.’

After a moment, 2D offers him what Murdoc is sure is supposed to be a sly grin. It’s a bit dopey, but it’s sweet enough. Murdoc reaches over and flicks his nose before leaving the room, whistling to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Plastic Beach.  
> \- Look at these assholes trying and failing to flirt, it’s hilarious.  
> \- There’s a really cool piano duet version of Toxic on youtube, and that’s basically what they’re playing.  
> \- Not much to say tbh, I just wanted something happier after the emotional drag of the last few chapters.  
> \- There’ll be another update on the 23rd, bc birthday boy.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	23. Polyphonic Prayer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s point between tipsy and drunk that Murdoc rarely reaches, and when he does, he’s willing to talk. [Phase 2]

Murdoc’s been antsy all day, pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing and –

He’s been back and forth between kitchen, bathroom, studio, car park, the locked door only he has the key to that burns 2D’s hands whenever he tries to jimmy it open with a loyalty card he never uses. (Just as well; it melts in the lock and the corridor stinks of burnt plastic all day.)  Noodle’s been doing her best to occupy him, because an antsy Murdoc is a dangerous one, but he won’t settle to anything, won’t settle to her drawing on him, or challenging him to duels on who can strum a tune faster, or him teaching her new skills. He won’t even settle to just playing his bass, which is unusual, even for his off days.

The guitar usually gets him to calm down, and sometimes he’ll even let someone else play along. 2D almost always avoids him on days like this, because about the only thing he’s good for is standing still and letting Murdoc knock the breath out of his lungs. But sometimes he’ll let 2D sing along, songs they grew up with, songs they make up on the spot and forget ten minutes later. It’s rare, though.

So 2D avoids him until he thinks it’s safe to say Murdoc is gone; sometimes he’s just in the Winnebago, down in the car park, with birds aplenty and alcohol to match, but sometimes he’s on a bender and they won’t see him for a week, a drunken phone call to Noodle’s voicemail the only indicator that he’s still alive.

But sometimes, he gets chatty. Not to say that Murdoc’s not chatty anyway, because the bastard rarely seems to shut his trap, but he gets chatty about important things. His past, before Stu-Pot, after, centuries before either of them. Prone to flights of fancy, is Murdoc Niccals, tales told like memories of London in ’66 – _sixteen_ -sixty-six, mind, not nineteen, not that Murdoc, still in Belphegor, would know anything of London the year he was born – of cigars and carriages and fires blazing miles high across the blocked-in horizon barely visible from the river. He quotes Wordsworth and Milton and Dante, Tennyson and Byron and once, he recites Neruda before falling silent and staring out of the window for the next four hours, looking morose and miserable and melancholic, fag and can in hand.

2D finds him sprawled out in the studio, feet up on the mixing desk, head back and staring at the ceiling. He has a bottle dangling between two fingers, cigarette in his mouth, idly spinning his office chair side-to-side. For a split second, 2D considers shutting the door and leaving, because he’d only come in to have something to do, but he doesn’t really need the studio to practice, not really, he’s got a keyboard in his bedroom, after all.

‘Do you think about _Norm’s_?’ Murdoc asks, and his eye is flashing fire-hot in the strip light.

2D hesitates and then shuts the door, crossing the room to flop into the other chair, fiddling with the sliders on one of the desks. Murdoc doesn’t slap his wrist the way he usually would; they’re done with the song they’d been recording, so they’ll be starting from scratch again.

‘The shop?’ he asks, and Murdoc watches him, hunching over in his seat, lips downturned, fiddling with the little plastic sliders. He grunts, and 2D glances at him before nodding. ‘Feels like I don’t think of nothing else some days.’

Murdoc huffs and rocks upright; his feet hit the floor with a bang, and his breath wheezes for a second. It startles 2D, but neither move.

‘I was thinking about it today,’ he says, quiet. He chews at his lip, tears a sliver of skin away, eyes fixed firmly on the booth through the window, still as just-popped-out empty as it had been last week, microphone still crooked, jammed into place half-arsedly and guitars resting in seats, still strapped and plectrums tucked safely away in the frets. ‘About. About August. The fifteenth.’

Murdoc may think about that day all the time, 2D figures, but he’s never mentioned it before.

‘I never apologised to your face,’ he continues. ‘Apologised in the hospital. Used to, to sit with you. Maybe that’s why they made me look after you.’

He looks across at the boy, who is steadfastly refusing to meet his eyes.

‘I didn’t – I should have thought there’d be someone there, you know? It was a Friday, what did I expect?’

‘It was a Saturday,’ Stu tells him. ‘I worked Saturdays.’

‘Nuh-uh,’ Murdoc replies, ‘the fifteenth was a Friday.’

‘Saturday.’

‘I am _not_ arguing dates and days and calendars with you, you little shit. It was a Friday. End of discussion.’

2D remains convinced that it was a Saturday, because he was working in the shop that day, and he worked Saturdays. But he keeps his mouth shut, because Murdoc is glaring, and he’s _apologising_ , and this will never happen again.

The fifteenth _was_ a Friday; Rachel had said, as they sat together in the waiting room waiting for the news of Stuart’s surgery, that her baby boy had only been in the shop to cover someone else’s shift. He was only supposed to work Saturdays. Murdoc barely remembers those hours sat there, handcuffed and bleeding and demonic fingers coiling vice-tight about his ankles, trying to tug him under the earth, but he remembers, clear as day, that Rachel wasn’t angry with him. He thinks it was the shock that had kept her tone calm, but she hadn’t raised her voice or her hand to her son’s almost-murderer. They’d just quietly sat there waiting. She hadn’t offered to help with his injuries, and Murdoc hadn’t expected her to. He’d taped up the gash in his forehead with some butterfly tape he nicked from a trolley on his way to the bathroom, but other than that, his bleeding, smashed face stayed as it had been moments after the crash.

The lack of anger was the worst part, he thinks. The quiet disappointment, the gut-wrenching _fear_ for her son’s life. The sadness. But there was no anger, and Murdoc hates that the most.

‘But whatever, yeah? Never said sorry to your face. Conscious face, anyway. So there; I’m sorry.’

‘Uh. Thanks, I think. But like, you woke me up, yeah? That’s alright by me. You robbing the shop actually did me a favour, yeah? Wouldn’t be a band if you hadn’t.’

They wouldn’t be a family, but he doesn’t say that. Murdoc still hasn’t forgiven them for bullying him into giving Noodle his name. Sure, he says it’s the least stupid of the three choices, but he also says he hates them for it, so there’s no telling with him.

‘You owe me big time,’ Murdoc reminds him, ‘I own you.’

But there is no bite in the words; he’s smiling, a little, the faintest dimple in his cheek.

‘Love you,’ 2D tells him, and grins when Murdoc throws his empty can at him, blocking the obvious, easy throw with an arm.

After a moment, Murdoc tells him that he knows, and then adds, ‘that’s the problem.’

2D does not think it’s a problem, and opens his mouth to say so, but then considers it, and instead, he says, ‘did you really sit with me?’

‘All day,’ Murdoc says, ‘after they let me out of the station, anyway. When you were out of surgery, and they gave the all-clear, I got dragged in to be processed. Fun times, I tell you. But yeah, straight after all that was done, I went straight back to the hospital. Almost got arrested again, ‘cause I ran a red light, you know? Don’t know why they didn’t arrest me, to be honest; I stole that car, too.’

‘Muds, for fuck sake.’

The older man just rubs his brow with his fingertips before canting his hips to get his cigarettes out. He offers one to 2D, who takes it and accepts the light. For a few moments they sit in silence, Murdoc rubbing his temple and 2D still fiddling with the sliders. When Murdoc looks, they almost make a pattern on the board. He can’t work out what it is, though.

‘You know,’ Stu murmurs after minutes of silence pass between them. ‘When I came ‘round, Mum showed me all these – she showed me the pictures the cops took.’

For a moment, Murdoc doesn’t move. He even stops breathing. Then the held breath leaves him in a gush, and he says, ‘my mug shot?’

‘You looked like shit.’

‘Broke my nose on the wheel,’ Murdoc nods.

‘Scarred your face,’ 2D agrees. ‘Absolutely ruined it. Terrible shame.’

Murdoc gives him a sidelong glance, but 2D just has that gentle little grin he gets when he’s being cheeky and knows it, and knows that it’s totally worth retaliation. Normally, it’s a grin he only wears around Noodle. Murdoc supposes he’s drunk enough that it doesn’t matter.

He’s pretty like that, Murdoc thinks, dimpled cheeks and freckles shining bright against the high flush. He could be any rom-com lead, any teen girl’s first wet dream. And boys too, he supposes, if you happen to be bent.

‘I thought I’d killed you,’ he says, ‘both times, I mean. I.’

He stops himself; he’d promised himself, all those years ago in that rainy, blood-streaked car park in Nottingham, as he stood there staring at the very much alive, very much _awake_ blue-haired, black-eyed god stood across from him, heart in his throat and stomach somewhere under his feet, that he would never _ever_ talk about it. He would never ever admit to being scared.

‘I was terrified,’ he blurts out. ‘The first time, I thought I’d killed you. I don’t remember much of that day. They said I was laughing.’

‘You were,’ Stu murmurs, ‘I remember hearing you. I thought I was in Hell.’

‘I definitely put you through Hell,’ Murdoc agrees with a world-weary sigh.

‘It wasn’t so bad. You woke me up.’

‘I s’pose.’

They fall silent again, stare at anything not each other.

Murdoc fiddles with his cigarette, stubs it out in the overflowing ashtray, puts his feet back up. His arms fold, his chin lowers. He looks morose again. 2D wants to say something to break the silence, break the sadness, but all he can think about is Murdoc’s face that day in the rain.

‘I. Things are better now though,’ he says, soft. ‘We’re better now.’

Murdoc hums, as though he hadn’t been listening, and looks over at him. His eyes are redder than normal, sickness-yellow sclera bloodshot.

‘Are we?’ he asks, but it sounds like he’s asking something else. 2D doesn’t know what it is, though.

‘Yes,’ he says, hopes that’s the answer Murdoc is looking for. He’d apologised. Maybe he wants forgiveness. ‘You know, I don’t blame you, or nothing. You – you didn’t know I was there, you couldn’t have known. It wasn’t your fault. I mean, I heard the car, I could have moved.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t think about it, to be honest.’

He doesn’t really think about anything, Murdoc thinks, but he hums instead.

‘I see,’ he says, though he’s not really looking at anything, let alone _seeing_.

2D sits there quietly afterwards; Murdoc seems to be done talking, and that’s fine. Thinking about the day they met hurts – it hurts his head, and it hurts in his belly, makes whatever’s in there churn and head back the way it came. But more than that, it hurts in his heart, his weak little ticker cracking at the veins and coming apart at the seams, and he says stupid things when he gets like that.

So he forces himself to say nothing, and not continue the conversation.

They sit in silence for another two hours before Murdoc begins to sober up, and without a word he gets up and leaves the room, and 2D doesn’t see him for another four-and-a-half days, and even then, it’s just a glimpse, a staggering, giggling mess of unknown highs and alcohol and sex, rounding a corner. The bathroom, 2D thinks, and heads in the other direction, clambering back up the stairs to go and invade Noodle’s space for a while, curl up around her and watch some cartoon he doesn’t understand but there are lots of flashing lights and girls doing fancy high kicks and waving wands and he’s all for that. It’s only later, when he looks at his calendar to turn the month to June, that he realises what the day had been when Murdoc had opened up to him, to have those quiet words spill from his mouth.

Twenty-third of May.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Empire Ants.  
> \- Happy birthday, Stuart Pot lmao  
> \- I know Murdoc says he owns 2D in RotO, but I forget where I read the “I love you” bit. I think it was on TVTropes, but it’s probably from RotO too. If someone could give me a ref on that, that’d be grand.  
> \- I’m sorry to anyone I upset by lying on the link. I wanted it to be a surprise. I never said it would be a nice one.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	24. Home-Cooked Breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s Russ’ birthday, and the babies are Determined. [Phase 1]

It’s been two years, eight months, six days, seven hours, one minute, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three seconds, and the long that time stretches, the – the –

Russel has sworn to try his best to not lie. It would be wrong to lie about this; he’s trying his hardest, he promised, that he would be good to Noodle, that he would give her what Murdoc and 2D were incapable of. Lying about his emotions would not be good, would not be healthy.

Honestly, it hasn’t stopped hurting. He doesn’t think losing Del will ever stop hurting. It doesn’t fade, doesn’t quieten. He’s not even really adjusted to it. He’s spoken, briefly, with older generations, who have lost their loved ones, ones they’ve loved for decades before Russ was born, before he was even a glimmer in his dad’s eye. They’ve all said the pain doesn’t leave, doesn’t lessen. You adjust, you work around it, but it remains a part of you.

Having Del there, lurking beneath his skin like Russ is no longer the one in charge, like his skeleton, his muscles, the tight network of veins coiling in the crease of his joints and a tangled web across the underside of his soul, it’s all Del now. Russ feels, sometimes, like he’s the second skin. Like his soul has been lost for Del’s. Maybe it has. Ghosts were the soul, right?

So here he is, two years later, still feeling the ache of the suspension in the back of his neck, the whiplash like the whistling heat of a bullet soaring past him, missing him by less than an inch. He burns with that heat.

Murdoc tells him he’s being an absolute pest, but Murdoc tells everyone they’re being a pest.

‘Look,’ he’d said, late one night months ago as they stood at the far end of the beach, and he’d had something fruity and sickly sweet in his hand, stinking of coconut with an umbrella, and Russ had had the same bottle of water in his hand for the last twelve hours. ‘Look, you’re being really – really – well, whatever you’re being, you’re doing too much of it.’

‘I can’t stop it, though,’ Russ had said, because how could he stop being something when he didn’t know what it was?

‘You can,’ Murdoc had assured him, clapping him on the back, and the stick of the drink in his hand had clung to the back of his vest for days. ‘And you will. For her. She deserves that much, right?’

Murdoc, Russel has learnt, is very good at giving sound advice, at giving you what you want and need to hear. But he’s very bad at following said advice, or listening to any of the words that come out of his mouth.

It’s been two years, eight months, six days, seven hours, five minutes and eighteen, nineteen, twenty seconds. In forty seconds, he thinks, in forty seconds he will be older than Del.

Funny, that.

Things have been oddly quiet the last couple of days. Russ thinks that it’s because 2D is still recovering from the utter debacle that was his birthday, and Noodle is only young, after all. The three boys, they’ve all got their birthdays close together, and they don’t really do anything, but Noodle insists.

She’d asked him what he wanted, and Murdoc had gotten this look on his face, like he knew exactly what Russel wanted to say, but somehow, he hadn’t known the drummer well enough to know that he’d never say something as wretched to a nine-year-old as all that. Honestly, Murdoc. Honestly.

He’d told her, with an easy smile, that there was nothing he wanted, not really.

‘I’m all grown up,’ he’d told her, smoothing his hand over her hair, ‘and I got plenty of money, yeah? You don’t have to buy me anything.’

She’d pursed her lips, and considered his words for a moment or three, mulled them over.

‘Well alright,’ she’d said. ‘If you’re sure.’

He was sure, and she’d jogged off out of the room and down the corridor. He listened to her clatter up the stairs, and smiled to himself, carried on with his day, thinking nothing more of it.

That had been a month ago, and as he lies in his bed, he doesn’t recall it, not in so many words. It’s a vague niggling sensation, like he’d forgotten a promise. He’s forgotten a lot of promises these days.

Ten-nine-eight-seven.

He rolls over, faces the wall, and considers that it is now his birthday, and he’s lying in bed staring at the wall and thinking about nothing particularly happy.

His door gets kicked open four seconds later, and there is an almighty screech accompanying it that makes him leap out of bed and scream back.

It is the middle of the night and Noodle is fully dressed with 2D backing her up. They are dressed and armed and dangerous, resplendent in feather boas and deely-bobbers. There is a cake on a tray in 2D’s hands and Russel is, in what he feels is a very understandable way, very concerned.

‘What the hell?’ he asks, because it is midnight, and he is not prepared for two very enthusiastically coloured small children (never mind that one was now in his twenties and half a foot taller than him) bursting into his room.

‘Happy birthday!’ Noodle yells, and springs into his arms.

It says something, he thinks as he catches her, arm going under her legs to support her as she loops her arms around his neck and embraces him hard, that he is too used to this.

‘Happy birthday!’ 2D echoes, just as loud.

‘Make a wish!’ Noodle tells him, tugging on his aching neck to make him move.

Russel realises, belatedly, that there are candles. They’re lit candles. Oh, Jesus Christ.

‘I don’t got anything to wish for, baby girl,’ he tells her, and 2D tells him to think of something.

‘The candles are gonna melt,’ 2D explains, and Russel doesn’t even mind that the numbers are wrong.

He’s not twenty-three, not any more. But it’s sweet all the same.

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘um. Well. I suppose I could always wish for – ‘

Noodle slaps a child-sticky (she’s been eating sweets, and he’ll get Murdoc back later) hand to his mouth, tells him to hush.

‘Doesn’t work!’ she tells him, quiet, conspiratorial. ‘Can’t say it.’

He laughs, and promises, from behind her hand, that he won’t tell her, and supports her as he ducks over to blow out the candles.

(He doesn’t wish for anything, gave up wishing years ago. Why did he need to wish once he had Del?)

When the candles are out, 2D moves to put the cake on Russel’s table, and Noodle slides to the floor to scurry back outside.

‘Listen,’ Russ says, but 2D turns sharp.

‘No,’ he says, points a finger, ‘you listen.’

Russel’s jaw snaps shut, and he listens.

‘It’s your birthday. Today is about you, and about doing things you enjoy. So I told Murdoc to fuck off for the day, and me and Noodle are gonna make you eat all the cake you can stand, and then we’re gonna take you out for the day and you’re gonna enjoy yourself.’

They stare at each other.

‘Alright,’ Russel says with a shrug. ‘Alright, sure. Do you need me to drive?’

2D flushes, rubs his neck. ‘Do you mind? I’m not supposed to, and I think I used all of Murdoc’s good graces getting all this sorted, you know?’

Russel doesn’t know, but he can well imagine, and he promises to drive without complaint. He’s saved from saying anything more by Noodle, who comes rushing in with bags almost too big to carry.

‘You’re kidding me,’ he laughs, but she is very much not kidding him, and she hops and skips her way over to him, dragging the bags along behind her until they’re at his feet.

‘For you!’ she says.

The wrapping is awful, positively _wretched_ , and he’s so touched he almost tears up.

‘Kids,’ he says, but they just smile and tell him he has to cut the cake first, or the wish will dry up.

(He wishes, when he cuts it, that things will never change.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Superfast Jellyfish.  
> \- The date for Del is utterly arbitrary.  
> \- Murdoc’s drinking a Piña Colada.  
> \- Man, does anyone remember deely-bobbers? I remember them, they got tangled in my hair 900% of the time.   
> \- I feel really bad for making this so short and shoddy, but I totally forgot it was Russ' birthday, so I cobbled this together on the shortest notice imaginable, gomen friends.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	25. The River Ain't Deep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Murdoc’s birthday has been and gone, and Noodle is about as mad as you expect. [Phase 1]

By his late teens, Murdoc had established, rightfully so he thought, that he’d had more than enough of birthdays. Give him a pack of fags and buy him a pint if you were so inclined, but otherwise fuck off. You weren’t wanted here with your false sympathies and joyous declarations. Birthdays were any other day and Murdoc was too full of himself to care about the day some mad cow pushed him out into the world.

Congratulations, he used to say, you birthed the Antichrist. Well done, you must be so proud of yourself. What a good, productive member of society you turned out to be, when your greatest claim to fame is Murdoc Niccals and you went so far as to stop existing to get away from him.

So no, birthdays, not his thing.

By his thirties, he’d mostly stopped caring about even congratulating the anonymous woman to whom society said he owed life. He’d spent twenty years searching fruitlessly for her and come up with the blazing trail of Murdoc Niccals causing death and despair in every part of his life. It was getting to the point where he was seriously considering that there might not _be_ a woman to whom he owed life. Perhaps he simply came to be out of his own spite for the idea.

Still, he thought, it was probably best he and his jaded rock star image got some mileage out of the 6/6/66 thing. Maybe. He’d used all his best jokes in a pub in Cornwall a decade ago, to some great success, or so he vaguely recalls. Walking had been hard the next morning, but he couldn’t remember what had happened to that end. He could guess, though.

There was another birthday secret shame, he supposes. Murdoc Niccals, incidental queer the same way an umbrella is an incidental accessory to a drink. Fuck sake.

Well, it was the early nineties. All sorts of things went on then. He couldn’t be blamed for all of them.

He’s thirty-four now, and happier for it. It suits him, his thirties, a quietness beginning to form behind his eyes and in his rotting marrow, like things are finally starting to settle, like he’s finally running in sync with the rest of the world. It’s nice.

Nicer is the too-hot, sticky warmth of Noodle sprawled out beside him, utterly oblivious to the movie still playing on the TV. Stu half-sleeps on his other side, lolling head occasionally bumping into his shoulder before jerking upright.

‘Go to sleep,’ Murdoc whispers.

Russel, asleep with Del sticking close beside him, fascinated by the movie, snorts. Del shivers.

'Wanna watch the movie,’ 2D whispers back.

A minute or so of stagnant silence, and then 2D’s head drops fully and stays. Murdoc waits a moment, and then lifts his arm to loop it over his shoulders. 2D settles as though he’d been waiting for it, sighing softly against Murdoc’s collar.

'You know,’ Del says, and grins when Murdoc offers him a glare. 'You ain’t half as secret as you’re thinking you are. More obvious than Russ, and he was a baby compared.’

'I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Murdoc sniffs.

'Course not. You know Noods knows your birthday was last week, right?’

'Was it? I hadn’t noticed.’

Del’s quiet for a minute and Murdoc glances at him; he’s gone still again, his static shivering like a paused VCR. Reading Russel, he thinks.

'You went out for a drink,’ Del says, slow, 'came home - that’s what made him notice. You went out and you came less than a day later. And you were drunk, sure, but you weren’t nearly as drunk as you usually are. He’s worried. Thinks you might be sick.’

'Mm.’

'You totally know it was you birthday. Noods is mad at all of yer now.’

'Why? We’re grown men, birthdays aren’t important anymore.’

Del looks at him with more shock than any other time in their admittedly short acquaintance.

'Aren’t - aren’t important? Muds, man - guy, she’s _ten_! It’s important to her! Incredibly so! Fuck, man! She’s young, yeah? These things are important to kids, help ‘em learn, and develop and shit. Helps ‘em develop emotions and normal responses to stuff, you know? She’s a little ray of sunshine in this place, man, let her have her fun, fuckin’ hell.’

Del grumbles to himself, and the static makes him wobble. He’s barely understandable like that, so Murdoc elects to ignore him, dropping his jaw against 2D’s crown and staring blankly at the screen. He stopped paying attention to the movie twelve scenes ago, and now he has no idea what’s happening, only that there are explosions and lots of yelling. Noodle sighs and drapes her legs over Murdoc’s lap, bony and short and with scabby knees. 2D, almost asleep, tweaks her toes. Murdoc is trapped in the pile of limbs and gives up, stays with his arms settled around them.

'She wants to make you happy,’ Del says. 'Let her, for once in your miserable existence.’

'Then it wouldn’t be a miserable existence if I was happy,’ Murdoc quips, and Del is so put out he tells him to go fuck himself and forcibly wakes Russ so that he doesn’t have to deal with him any longer.

Russel jerks awake with a snort and a flailing hand, and looks around, confused, for a moment or two before looking across at Murdoc on the couch, sandwiched between the other two band members.

‘Fuck just,’ he starts, and then stops, rubs his face. He looks exhausted, and Murdoc almost tells him to go back to sleep. ‘I feel – you piss Del off or something?’

‘He pissed himself off,’ Murdoc tells him. ‘Go back to sleep. You’ll be no good to me tomorrow if you’re falling asleep on the drum kit. I mean, not that I wouldn’t do a better job than you anyway, but I’d rather not have to run myself ragged holding this band together. Oh wait, I forgot, I already do.’

‘Don’t hurt yourself with your nose,’ Russel sniffs, and turns to face the other way, pressing his shoulder into the chair and after a minute or so, his breathing evens out.

Murdoc shifts his head to rest his cheek against 2D’s crown rather than his jaw, and he shuts his eyes. Another explosion with screeching tires has 2D wriggling closer, and his leg shifts against Murdoc’s, as if to lift up and over, but then decides against it, and he stays with his legs in his spot on the couch. Noodle’s are taking up most of Murdoc’s lap, anyway, and he only has so much room there.

The movie’s over before Murdoc falls asleep, but he’s got no heart to disturb his current living blankets to get the remote to change the channel. He sleeps to the sound of his band breathing, and the looping menu of the movie, and the odd pawing zombie against the window.

It’s early in the morning when Noodle wakes, and she’s not awake enough, it seems, because the first thing she does (later, they learn, to disentangle herself from her own limbs and from Murdoc’s half-hearted sleeping embrace, and the arm 2D had flung over her), is knee Murdoc in the crotch. He, quite understandably, yowls like a cat, and then 2D and Russ are awake too and the morning is getting off to a very not-particularly-great start.

‘Noodle!’ Murdoc calls after her as she scurries off with a cackle. ‘Noodle, apologise!’

‘Muds,’ 2D grumbles, rubbing at his head, because Murdoc did accidentally chin him when Noodle kneed him in the dick. ‘Apologise to me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Murdoc says immediately, even going as far to pet the sore spot on 2D’s scalp. ‘Get off me, I need to kick her in the shins.’

‘You’re not kicking her in the shins,’ Russel snorts, and hauls himself to his feet. ‘Noodle! Get back here and apologise to your granddad!’

‘Granddad?’ Murdoc squawks, and fights his way out from under 2D’s errant limbs to follow him down the corridor. ‘Granddad! I’ll give you granddad!’

2D decides to stay where he is, and finds the remote down the side of one of the couch cushions, and changes the channel onto morning cartoons.

Murdoc and Russel migrate to the kitchen, or rather, Russel migrates to the kitchen, and Murdoc follows him, bitching all the way, and only shuts up with Russel tells him to go outside and have a cigarette and get his underwear unknotted.

When Murdoc returns, Noodle is sat at the table eating cereal, and he drops into the chair opposite her.

‘Good morning, Muds,’ she says, and smiles at him. Milk drips down her chin.

He doesn’t seem to realise he’s reached over the table to wipe it off until almost thirty seconds have passed after he’s retreated to his side of the table and has wiped his finger off on his shirt.

Well, then.

Noodle looks at him, and he refuses to acknowledge her.

Russel goes to track 2D down and get him to the table for breakfast, and Noodle continues to eye Murdoc over her bowl. He continues to ignore her, picking at his nails.

‘We missed your birthday,’ she says.

‘Did we? What a shame.’

She scowls, and there’s a thump. The table jumps. She seems madder that she didn’t manage to kick him in the shin, and Murdoc grins at the avoided bruise.

‘It’s _important_ , Muds!’ she exclaims, and slaps her palms on the table. ‘We’re gonna celebrate, okay? Okay.’

There was no pause, giving him no time to refute her decision.

‘We don’t need to celebrate,’ he tells her, ‘I celebrated. Been there, done that. I’m thirty-four, love, I don’t need a cake and party hats.’

‘Yes you do,’ she insists. ‘I’ll make sure. Me and Two-chee. We’ll sort it out.’

One day, Murdoc thinks. One day, he’s going to have a stroke, and these sods won’t have a clue. They won’t be able to tell the difference between his expression now and him having a stroke, there is no possible way.

‘Noodle,’ he sighs, and she beams at him.

‘Murdoc,’ she replies.

‘Listen, my birthday, it doesn’t matter, okay? It’s just another day. I don’t need to have any kind of celebra – you know what? Go wild. Do what you want. Invite everyone you can think of. Have a huge party if you want. I don’t care. As long as I get a fag break out of the festivities, I don’t care at all. If it makes you happy, you do it.’

She eyes him.

‘You promise?’ she asks.

‘Sure. Don’t expect me to get involved, though.’

‘So I can do what I want?’

‘Go wild. Make sure you ask Russel before you do anything dangerous.’

She eyes him some more, but he must have something genuine on his face because she rushes out of the room, yelling for Stu-Pot, who Russel had just managed to convince to leave the couch, and he’s promptly dragged back. Murdoc listens to them yelling and running down the corridors, and Russel comes back to find him in the kitchen using her empty bowl as an ashtray.

‘Muds, not at the table, man, come on.’

Murdoc waves the cigarette at him in apology. Or a flagrant disregard for his want to not have ash in the cereal bowls. It’s hard to tell with him.

‘Noodle’s in a good mood,’ Russel remarks, taking the bowl from him and rinsing it out in the sink. ‘What did you say to her?’

‘It’s something Del said to me last night,’ Murdoc says with a frown. ‘About things being important to her, ‘cause she’s young or whatever. Ray of sunshine and all that jazz. Let her plan a birthday party for me, if it makes her happy.’

Russel looks at him as if he’s gone mad. At thirty-four years and four days, Murdoc is used to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from New Genius (Brother)  
> \- Whoops my ships are showing again, alas alack. I’m trying to keep them out as much as I can, but lbr here guys, Murdoc is so gay  
> \- I feel like Murdoc fluctuates on how self-absorbed he actually is. He’s always self-absorbed, but sometimes that absorption is loathing, sometimes it’s love. He’s a fickle man.  
> \- I’m really sorry this is so late, I’ll try and get back on schedule of an update a week or so, I dunno, it depends how things go.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	26. Players Play

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2D keeps a lot of useless shit around. [Phase 2]

2D is unpacking a box of his possessions when Noodle finds him.

‘Hello!’ she says, and helps herself to a seat on the bed as he wanders back and forth, putting handfuls of DVDs into the display unit screwed into the wall. She remembers the arguments about that shelf, the way Murdoc had waved a screwdriver around and she hadn’t understand a word he said, but 2D had been trying to hold the unit steady and doing a very bad job of it. The DVDs fall to one side if not braced, and it makes her smile.

‘Hello, love,’ he replies, reaches over to ruffle her hair.

As he transfers the rest of the DVDs to the unit, she fiddles with loose odds-and-ends in the box, trinkets like ticket stubs and army men and novelty keyrings she recognises as prizes from coin machines at the funfair.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, when she sees a box under the junk.

‘Huh?’ 2D comes back to the box and looks inside. ‘Oh! That’s my _Euro ’96 Subbuteo_ set.’

‘What’s _Subbuteo_?’ she asks, and he hauls the box out, shoving the larger plastic storage box out of the way to sit, cardboard box on his lap.

‘It’s a tabletop footie game,’ he says, and lifts the lid with a tight-cardboard squeal to reveal all of its contents, still carefully packaged.

‘You haven’t played with it?’ she asks, prodding at the plastic bags.

‘No,’ he says, tilts his head as if trying to remember why not. ‘No, I. I was still in the coma when I got it.’

Noodle laughs, and nudges him with an elbow. ‘You can’t get anything when you’re in a coma, silly.’

‘Sorry,’ he says, flushes. ‘I meant like, I got given it, you know? As a present?’

‘Who gives that kind of present to a coma patient?’

‘Murdoc,’ 2D mumbles. ‘He bought it. Mum said she told him that’s why I had the Saturday job, you know? At the place Murdoc ram-raided. She reckons he felt guilty, but.’

Noodle waits, patiently. This is the first thing not addictive consumables that she knows Murdoc to have bought 2D, and she’s fascinated. It’s a before time, before her, before the band, before _this_. She rarely hears tales of a time before the band; Murdoc refuses to talk about Stoke-on-Trent and Russel and 2D’s memories are jumbled at best.

‘I don’t think it was guilt?’ 2D says, quiet, still looking at the game. ‘I think he thought it might wake me up, yeah? Like, he could get out of taking care of me and stuff if I was awake, ‘cause my parents would take me home and he wouldn’t have to worry about me no more.’

Noodle doesn’t tell him that being awake has not stopped Murdoc worrying about him, because they all worry about him. Murdoc is just the best at hiding it.

‘Not that he took much care of me anyway,’ 2D continues, grumbling a little. ‘Mum said I used to come back with all sorts of bruises and stuff. But whatever, it’s all over now, I guess. And he bought me the _Subbuteo_ set, so that was nice of him.’

It would have been nicer if he hadn’t hit him in the face with a car, Noodle thinks, but then thinks, a little meanly, that if he hadn’t, they wouldn’t be sat here now. Murdoc’s right in that his dashing, debonair plans had created the band, but he could have just asked.

‘Do you,’ she starts, and then stops. Frowns at her shoes, feet still not quite touching the floor. ‘Do you – regret this? The band?’

2D is fiddling with one of the goals, tracing his fingers over the crosshatch of the netting. For a minute or so, he sits in silence, and she hopes he’s considering it and not tuning her out.

‘Naw,’ he says eventually with a soft shake of his head. ‘Naw, I don’t think I’d have been happy, staying at home with the – the Emporium. And I was with this girl, Paula. She was nice – really, really nice! I think I could have been happy with her. But, I dunno, love. It was. It was kinda.’

He stops talking, and chews at his lip as he thinks about how to say it.

‘It’s like. Um. I don’t. Things could have – should have! – been different, you know?’

She does know. So many things should have been different. She doesn’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

‘But it’s all worked out, right? I mean, we’re here now. And we’re not – we’re okay. We came back, and I haven’t – me and Muds, we gotta work it out in our own time, right? But we’ll get there.’

Noodle is fairly certain that he’s not actually answered the question, but that’s fine, she never really expected him to.

‘I understand,’ she says. ‘You don’t regret the outcome, just the path we got here by.’

‘Yeah! That’s it! You’re so good with your words now, Noods. It’s real great, hearing you talk proper.’

She smiles, and he beams back. Sometimes, she thinks she’s perfectly aware of what he’s doing and saying, and plays it up out of expectation, and other times she can’t be sure he even understands himself. But still, he’s sweet. Harmless, really.

‘It’s nice seeing you confident as well,’ she says, and touches his hand.

He’s as English-cool as ever, rainy and soft and boyish, wear on the knuckles, on the fingertips, dirt beneath his nails. She’s missed touching him. Being away had made her think that she was alright, that things were fine, that she was older and more mature and Knew Better now. She was wrong, of course, but never mind, she supposes. Never mind.

She’s still young. Still so much to learn, to know, to understand.

‘Being away was good,’ he says, and he touches her hand as if he can’t believe it’s real. He missed her a lot, she knows. ‘But being back is better. You gonna give me those lyrics you wrote? I wanna start practising. Gotta make this album the best, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she smiles, nods. ‘Yeah.’

She looks at the _Subbuteo_ set in his lap, still pristinely packaged and unplayed, a toy for a boy long lost in the rain, and leaps to her feet.

‘Finish unpacking,’ she says, ‘and I’ll bring you the lyrics then, okay?’

He nods, and pulls her in for a hug, because he’s missed hugging her, and she has always thought he gave the best, so she’s more than happy to give in, to bury her face in his paracetamol- and body spray-stinking neck and just hold him for the moment. It’s nice.

‘I missed you,’ she whispers, and he hums, squeezes her tight.

‘I missed you too, love,’ he whispers back, and it takes him a few minutes to let her go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Sweepstakes.  
> \- 2D says in RotO that the reason he had the Saturday job was to get the Euro 96 Subbuteo set. He then goes on to talk about the similarities and differences between sets, and it’s so sweet like what an adorable boy. I think my brothers had that one, too.  
> \- Short but sweet???  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	27. Summer Holiday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a fun day at the beach. [Phase 1]

It’s early, Murdoc has a hangover, and he knows, he _knows_ that it’s Noodle at his door, hammering away with one little, diamond-hard fist. There’s a specific panel that’s just level with her door-knocking and it’s that panel getting knocked on. So unless a particularly enthusiastic dog is smashing its face on said door, it’s the little devil herself.

‘Alright!’ he calls, and clears his throat when the word drags itself out of his throat and brings five-feet-five-inches of sleep-heavy dry heaving with it, ‘alright! I’m coming, I’m coming. Keep your knickers on.’

He has to pause, halfway out of swinging his way out of bed, to laugh. It’s a shame it was wasted on a mostly incoherent ten-year-old, because it was a damn fine line.

He finds his jeans in a heap halfway across the room, kicked off in a drunken stupor at some point, and flung in whatever direction his hand had decided was the right one, and yanks them on, barely remembering to do them up before pulling the door open.

‘What?’ he asks, and tries to keep the venom to a minimum.

She grabs his arm, fingers coiling like the octopus’ tentacles and probably tighter, and begins tugging.

‘Noodle!’ he laughs, because he can’t help but laugh, and struggles to match his stride to hers. She walks very fast, but her legs are so short.

It’s adorable, truly.

They reach the lifts before she stops and jabs at the ground floor button.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks, because she hasn’t said a word.

‘Beach!’ she chirps, and he stares at the top of her capped head.

‘Beach,’ he repeats.

‘Beach!’

Well, alright then.

‘Can I get dressed first?’ he asks, and she turns a disbelieving gaze up to him, green eyes wide. ‘What?’

‘Dressed?’ she echoes, and purses her lips, looks him up and down.

There are people waiting for the lift behind them, and Murdoc tugs her out of the queue to give them space. She protests, but doesn’t go back to the lifts.

‘One, where’s that twat who translates for you, I’m paying him far more than I should be to follow you around, fucking creep. Two, I know I don’t wear clothes at home, but we aren’t at home, love. I can’t go outside without shoes on, God knows what I’ll get. You don’t want me to die, do you?’

It’s a gross tactic, but her thinking face pauses, eyes widening and mouth opening, and then she’s flinging herself at him, almost taking her eye out on the button of his jeans, and her hair is burning hot against his belly, heated for an hour or more already by the sun. He pats her shoulder as she digs her fingers into the small of his back and he’s used to having scratches, but honestly, the half-moon nails of a ten-year-old gouging flakes of skin from his skin is beyond ridiculous.

‘That’s why I need shoes,’ he says, placating, prying her hands free before she draws blood. ‘Where’s Russel or Dent-face?’

‘Beach,’ she mumbles into his belly, and she sounds like a parrot.

‘Oh. Right. Go wait in reception for me, then,’ he says, pulls himself free at last and crouches to look her in the eye. ‘I’ll be ten minutes, maximum.’

‘Ten minutes,’ she says, and looks at her watch. Murdoc is half-convinced that it’s actually 2D’s watch, but he honestly can’t remember.

‘Two numbers,’ he tells her, and points. ‘When the big hand’s on – on – seven. I’ll be down. If I’m not, you can come kick the door in, okay?’

‘Big hand on seven,’ she says, and he watches her count the little lines for individual minutes off. ‘Okay. Big hand on seven. I’ll count!’

With that she’s shoving him back to the corridor for their rooms, and he laughs, hurries back to find his boots and a shirt. It takes him two minutes to get dressed, but he spends another five minutes going through the motions, washing his face, having a piss, giving his mouth a cursory swill with the complimentary mouthwash to get the worst of the taste out. He’s got two minutes to spare by the time he’s out of the door, and he takes a leisurely stroll down the stairs, unlit cigarette in his mouth and pockets full of everything he doesn’t need.

He roots through the tangled mess of his keys for the half-finished packet of mints, and he greets Noodle in the foyer by throwing them at her. She wheels at his idle call, and catches them with a whip-fast motion of her hand.

‘Beach?’ she asks, and he nods, offers his hand.

‘Yeah, beach.’

She scurries over to take it, and begins dragging him out of the hotel and down to the beach front.

Stu-Pot is already lobster red, making pathetic whining noises under the umbrella Russel has no doubt installed next to his towel. Murdoc rolls his eyes and gives him a (not-at-all-gentle) lovetap to the sunburnt shin.

‘Should have waited for me,’ he says, and plonks himself down on the spare bit of towel to his right. ‘I’d have told you not to take your trousers off.’

‘I told him not to,’ Russel says, and opens his arms for the eager Noodle, who throws herself at him and immediately starts talking in broken English. For a minute after, Russel focuses on her, on deciphering what she’s saying, and then he gets her an ice-cream from the coolbox.

Murdoc is already sweating; the sky picture-perfect, not a cloud even so much as on the horizon, and it’s burning hot against his dark jeans and leather boots. Kicking the latter off, he flops back to stare at the inside of the umbrella, and announces that he might die.

‘Noodle, why?’ he whines, pushing upright enough to peer over 2D’s button nose and give her a pitiful expression she doesn’t react to. ‘Why do you have to do this to me, love? What did I do to deserve this?’

Russel snorts. ‘You want that list alphabetically or chronologically?’

Murdoc throws a handful of sand at him. It mostly goes up 2D’s nose and in his mouth, and he downs half a bottle of water attempting to get it out.

‘Muds,’ he complains, and throws a handful of sand back.

Laughing, he throws himself out of the way of Murdoc’s sudden lunge, and stumbles off down the beach, running as much as he can away from the chasing bassist. Noodle looks to Russel, who nods, waving her off, and then she’s giving chase too. Russel elects to stay by the towels, soaking up the sun, not exhausting himself by trying to keep up with them. He notices, as he watches 2D skip through the water, using his longer legs and lack of trousers to his advantage, since Murdoc gets weighted down by the water, that Murdoc had already been lagging behind, too unfit to give chase for long in this heat.

Noodle eventually catches up to him, launching herself at his back and sending him rocketing forward several steps before finally tripping over some seaweed and going face-first into the sea. With a screech, Noodle is bucked off when he manages to throw himself upright, utterly repelled by water at all turns, and she lands in the sea with a splash and a cackle. 2D comes jogging back to help her pick herself up, and she kicks water at the already-drenched Murdoc, chattering all the way. She seems so utterly unbothered by Murdoc throwing her off into the water, and it’s nice to see Murdoc engaging in a bit of (mostly) non-harmful play with the two younger band members.

Murdoc, for his part, is absolutely _livid_. Soaked to the bone, with the salt-water stinging in the cuts in his knuckles, he’s furious. But he’s laughing, a genuine, honest-to-Satan laugh that begins in his belly and worms its way out with permission. He lets Noodle win the water war, even lets 2D get a few free splashes in before taking him down, and ends up on his arse with the waves reaching his armpits, laughing until he’s swallowing a mouthful of seawater from a final, triumphant splash from Noodle.

‘You cheeky little sod,’ he gags, and manages to spit the worst of the salt out. Wiping his mouth, he swipes his arm across the water, splashes her as hard as he can.

He manages to get back to his feet without a wave taking him over again, and 2D offers a hand to help him.

‘I’m not that old,’ Murdoc sniffs, and ignores the proffered palm.

2D supposes not, and keeps his trap shut.

‘C’mon,’ Murdoc grunts, ‘out the water ‘fore you make yourselves ill, c’mon, out we get.’

He herds them back to Russel, who is waiting with fresh towels. Murdoc grumbles about having to sit around in salt-wet jeans and T-shirt, but obligingly helps Noodle towel-dry her hair and hat while Russel, who has the gentler hands of the two of them, helps get 2D’s burnt skin dry.

‘You really need to go inside before it gets worse,’ he says, but 2D shakes his head.

‘Nah, I gotta stay out here, with you guys.’

Murdoc, currently scrubbing Noodle’s hair, pauses and looks at him with a wrinkled nose.

‘You what?’ he asks, ‘you prat, you’re no good to us all blistered and shit. Get inside and get some after-sun on you. This is the kind of _nonsense_ that makes Jesus weep, you know.’

He continues grumbling to himself, something about him being dropped on his head as a baby, and Noodle chatters to herself in turn. Russel manages to half pick out something about 2D’s skin, but he can’t work out anything more with the way she’s muffled by the towel over her head.

After several minutes of sitting around with his jeans getting stiffer and stiffer as they dry, Murdoc gives up and announces that he is going to return to the hotel to change, and makes it crystal clear that 2D _will_ be accompanying him. He is not allowed to _not_ accompany him.

‘I will tie you right the fuck down,’ he says, and 2D follows along dutifully.

Murdoc bitches at him the entire time about what an idiot he is to let himself get so sunburnt in the first place.

‘Fucking useless,’ he grunts, and hits the button for the elevator. ‘First thing you need to do is get in a cold shower. Satan below, it’s like I’m your fucking mother.’

2D tells him he’s being unreasonable. Murdoc kicks him (harder than before) in the shin.

As Murdoc follows him to his room to make sure he does actually get in the shower, he mumbles to himself about how he thinks he has some Vaseline somewhere and you were supposed to put Vaseline on sunburn to keep it moisturised or some shit. 2D makes a comment about not wanting the Vaseline when he knows where it’s likely been that has Murdoc kicking him in the arse, sending him tumbling forward into the door.

 ‘Just get in the shower, you prat,’ he says, but for a second, he looks fond.

After changing and locating the Vaseline, he goes and wastes all of it on making sure 2D’s skin is evenly covered.

‘Sleep, I guess,’ he says, when 2D asks what he has to do now that he’s stuck inside. ‘I’ll send Noodle up when she starts burning. You can geek out over spinning tops or yoga or whatever it is you two get up to.’

He knows, as he strolls back to Russel and Noodle on the beach, that when Noodle goes, Russ and Murdoc will be quick to follow; Russel was fond of the beach, in so much as he enjoyed watching Noodle enjoying the beach, but it wasn’t so much Murdoc’s thing. Jamaica had been nice, because they’d been elsewhere during the hot parts of the day, often asleep, and it meant that being on the beach had been a little more pleasant. This, though, this stifling heat and blistering sun, nah, that’s not his thing.

Noodle’s nose starts getting red after another hour, so they pack up and head back to the hotel, eventually piling into 2D’s room with take-away and beer for the boys and milkshakes for their baby girl, and spend the evening watching talk shows and playing idle music. It’s nice, relaxed and without stress.

In the morning, 2D is back on the beach despite both Murdoc and Russel following him down the corridor yelling at him to get his flaky, lobster arse back in his hotel room where he can’t get himself into _more_ trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title is from Cliff Richard, I guess??   
> \- This was originally a Tumblr prompt, but I’ve got so many messages in my inbox since I’ll be damned if I can find it, so I’m super sorry this is late as all heck, and I hope it’s okay anon if you’re reading this!!  
> \- Vaseline is a real remedy for sunburn, bc it’s water-based and traps moisture in the skin I guess??  
> \- I don’t really have a lot else to say, except I’m back, kind of, sort of? I missed writing Gorillaz tho, so who knows, maybe I’ll have a few more updates in the next week or so?  
> \- Comments/reviews would be hella appreciated so I know you guys are still interested lmao   
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	28. Learn it Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noodle needs to learn more than just great music, and naturally the boys can’t take responsibility. [Phase 1]

There are only a few occasions in Noodle’s admittedly rather lacking memory that she wakes to find an argument going on downstairs. It’s not unusual that she overhears arguments – they try, bless them, to not argue around her, because it’s a “bad environment” for a child or some other such bollocks, but they are four very different personalities living under one roof, of course they’ll fight; one of them is _Murdoc_ , for heaven’s sake! – but it’s rare they happen before she’s even fully awake.

Granted, this is usually because it’s rare anyone’s awake before her. 2D tries, sets his alarm for seven-fifteen, but either sleeps through it or hits snooze until he jams the button and has to crawl out of bed to turn it off manually. Russel is good at getting up, but he doesn’t often surface until he has to. Murdoc is an enigma. If he sleeps at all, which Noodle is not entirely certain he does, he does it at odd hours when none of them can catch him. With the way he clatters and bangs and makes ladies shout, it’s certainly not when the rest of them are in bed.

So waking up to find all three of the boys shouting at each other is a sign something has been building for days, and has finally boiled over. Sneaking as quietly as she can – and she’s the best sneak in the house, ask 2D – she creeps downstairs until the voices are clear. She only understands some of the words at best, but she tries nonetheless. It’s what Russel always tells her to do.

‘Look,’ Murdoc is snarling, and she can imagine him, hunched shoulders, fists on the kitchen table like one of those silverbacks she sees on the TV, trying to throw his weight around even though he doesn’t weigh anything at all, and she should know, she managed to pick him up last week. Sure, it was only a couple of inches, and his toes were brushing the carpet, but she still got him off the floor. ‘Listen to me, for once in your miserable fucking pothole of an existence, and understand that this is _not happening_. I refuse to allow it. My band is not being pulled apart for something so _stupid_.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ Russel is snapping back, and Noodle sees him leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded, scowl deep. He’s not intimidated by Murdoc’s attempted alpha male horseshit in the least, doesn’t let the older man bully him. Murdoc is scared of Russel, though, just a little. He knows the strength behind those warm, soft hands of his. ‘You’re being stupid! Just because you don’t have any qualifications doesn’t mean the rest of us have to fucking suffer!’

2D is saying nothing, and Noodle decides he’ll be by the door, furthest away from Murdoc, but out of arm’s reach of Russel too. He’ll have his hands up by his face, fingers weaving in and out of each other, his hair, his mouth. He keeps biting his fingers, and he should stop doing that.

‘I have qualifications,’ Murdoc spits, and then hesitates. ‘Well, one. But even so. She doesn’t _need_ any. She just needs to play.’

‘She’s not a fucking robot!’ Russel roars. Something smashes; a mug. The kitchen is silent for several long moments, and she worries she’s been seen.

But that’s silly, she’s a full room and a shut door away from them. Perhaps they’re waiting to hear her moving. She stays mouse-quiet, pressed against a wall to minimise visibility and potential for falling over.

Eventually 2D suggests, in his awkward, squawking voice, ‘why don’t we get a tutor? I had one when I was her age. After I fell out the tree, I mean.’

She can feel Murdoc’s glare from here, and inches out of its way.

‘That’s,’ Russel starts, quieter now, calmer. The mug must have been one of Murdoc’s. Hopefully, Noodle thinks, a little spiteful, it was that one with Kate Bush on it. ‘That’s actually a really good idea. I mean, we can cover the basics, have been covering the basics, but giving her a tutor could be good. She’d get to know more people.’

‘No,’ Murdoc says, loud. ‘No, I refuse. You are not bringing strangers into my home.’

‘Your home?’ Russel snorts.

2D starts to chuckle, but it gets cut off by a loud thump of wood. Murdoc’s punched the table, and she laments the dent his stupid ugly-as-all-hell skull ring will have made in the wood.

‘I pay the fucking bills,’ Murdoc spits, and Russel guffaws.

‘You don’t pay _shit_ ,’ he laughs, and Noodle imagines he’s waving his hand, dismissive, the way he does when someone says something ridiculous. ‘You got this place rent-free, you ass.’

Murdoc must be pouting, because Murdoc always pouts. ‘I still have to pay bills.’

But Russel is ignoring him. ‘I think ‘D’s onto something. There must be a few tutors in London who can speak Japanese, right? Maybe we can get one to come over a couple of days a week. We need to get her English up before we can teach her the rest.’

Noodle frowns at her toes for a few long moments as silence reigns in the kitchen. A tutor for her? Does she need a tutor? Murdoc’s right, she just needs to know how to play her guitar, and she’s the best guitarist in the world. That’s all she wants to do, and it’s not like she’ll be alone or anything, right? The boys will always be there to look after her, and she’s learning English really well, so Russel says.

She doesn’t need a tutor, she doesn’t, she doesn’t, she doesn’t.

Caught up in her thinking as she is, she completely misses the pop of the kitchen door opening, and 2D makes an “oh!” sort of noise when he finds her crouched around the corner.

‘Hello,’ he says, and flops onto the floor next to her.

She immediately crawls into his lap, pressing her face into his collar and refusing to move. He stays where he is, hand on her back, and if he thinks she’s heard them, he doesn’t say it.

‘Did you have a nightmare?’ he asks, and if it was anyone but 2D, she’d think he was offering her an escape route, a way to avoid them talking about what happened.

So she nods, and sniffles, and she doesn’t remember when she started tearing up, but tear up she has.

‘Poor girl,’ 2D hums, and they sit there for another few minutes before Russel comes across them.

 ‘Hey,’ he says, and crouches to run a hand over Noodle’s hair. ‘You alright?’

‘I think she’s ill,’ 2D says, quiet, and Noodle pretends to be asleep.

‘Alright,’ Russel agrees, just as quiet, and carefully gets his hands in between them to lift her.

2D is quite capable of carrying her, and she knots her fingers into his T-shirt, refusing to let go. Laughing, 2D tells Russel it’s alright, she can stay, and somehow manages to get her up onto his hip so he can carry her to the nearest couch. The floor is nice and all, but it’s pretty hard. And it’s no good for 2D’s back, being all bony and thin and sticky-out as it is.

So to the couch they go, and she wriggles as close as she can get before 2D eventually realises she’s awake, and he laughs, that breathless, baffled little laugh he does when he’s not sure what his reaction _should_ be, and he only has laughter to fall back on. Laughter diffuses a situation. Makes people stop, makes people think.

She peeks up at him from under her hair shoved into her lashline by her helmet, and he carefully brushes it to the sides so that she doesn’t ruffle it with every blink.

‘You were never asleep,’ he accuses, gentle, because bless him, Stuart Pot doesn’t know how to be mean if he got a million pounds for it. He’d try and emulate Murdoc, but Murdoc doesn’t much know how to be mean either.

Violent and aggressive and angry, yes. Rude and immature and hyper-aware of his own ugliness, true. But mean, no, no, he doesn’t do mean very well. He has a knee-jerk reaction to things, spits insults as a shield, throws fists and palms and bottles as a retaliation for his own lack of understanding.

And 2D copying that is like a child copying their father without having an understanding or context for their father’s actions. It’s sweet, in that roundabout way that requires a fisheye lens and several strong bevs to be able to call it something as saccharine and inappropriate as “sweet.”

‘No,’ she agrees, because she needs to say something. ‘Don’t tell.’

‘I won’t,’ he promises, and he won’t.

2D is bad at keeping secrets. But he’s good at not telling. He forgets easily; secrets are something to remember. Not telling is something completely different.

See, she thinks. See. She knows them, she understands people. She has learnt many things. She doesn’t need a tutor. She does not need to learn, she is learning just fine on her own.

 ‘Tutor,’ she mumbles into his shirt, sounding the word out.

She had a tutor. A teacher. She had one back – back – she had one. She thinks.

‘Yeah,’ 2D nods, ‘yeah, to help with your – with your English, ‘cause we don’t know what you say, yeah? And if we get someone who knows what we say and you say, then we don’t gotta do that picture game where you gotta draw things not words.’

Noodle knows all about the picture game where you draw things instead of words, and she knows all about how awful an artist Murdoc Niccals is, especially when he’s had a few too many and can’t think of the _word_ he’s trying to _draw_. Jesus wept.

She hums, and frowns into the faded Tazar scrawled across 2D’s T-shirt, and then lifts her head again.

‘Words are good,’ she says, and 2D nods.

‘Words are real good! You’ll like words a lot, Noods, I promise. You’ll be able to – to – you get to make jokes about Murdoc, and we get to laugh at ‘em, ‘cause we _get_ them.’

Noodle has tried for many moons to get the boys to understand her jokes, going as far as drawing (incredibly shitty) pictures to explain the concept, but once you have to explain a joke, it stops being funny, so she gave up, and she makes herself laugh, and Russell says that’s the important thing. As long as she makes herself laugh, no one can stop her.

She’s the best guitarist in the world, anyway, so Murdoc says, and if Murdoc knows anything, he knows music, especially guitars, and he wouldn’t lie to her.

See, knows him.

She doesn’t need a tutor.

But words are nice, 2D’s right.

‘I will see this tutor,’ she says, and 2D looks baffled for a second.

‘You will?’ he asks, when it’s sunk in.

She nods, and moves to sit next to him, rather than in his lap, because if she’s going to have a tutor, she’s going to have to look like a grown-up, and behave better than not at all.

‘Yes. I will see this tutor. He will be good, yes?’

‘I should think so,’ 2D nods, ‘Russ won’t get a shit – a _bad_ one! He knows how to talk to people.’

Noodle considers this.

‘We’ll see,’ she says.

Alan is a fucking idiot, and she hates him on sight. But he speaks fluent Japanese and uses slang she’d forgotten about, and she likes that enough to not kick him in the shins every time he tries to correct her pronunciation of 2D.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- GUESS WHO’S BACK SORTA KINDA PROBABLY NOT REALLY  
> \- I got a really nice anon on tumblr who was really nice, shout out, friend!  
> \- its weird writing these guys again, we’ll see how long it lasts, don’t get your hopes up lol  
> \- hope you enjoyed, lovelies~!


	29. Maintain the Aesthetic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A zombie escapes into Kong. It goes better than you’d expect.

Someone’s come for an interview or something, a tour of the place. Nobody cares except Murdoc, because Murdoc likes showing off what they’ve done with the place. 2D asked him once if he’d shown them the scratchy-door, and Murdoc had punched him in the nose. The interviewer, from what 2D remembers though the codeine-addled daze he’d put himself in afterwards, had looked concerned about something that could have a name like “scratchy-door,” and he vaguely remembers Murdoc trying to laugh it off.

The fact is, the scratchy-door is about as secure as they can make it, which isn’t really secure at all, and zombies keep breaking it. Weapons are strategically placed throughout Kong, in the event of such a break-out, but 2D is not expecting the door to give way whilst he’s in the pantry looking for those cookies he and Noodle had made that she promised he could have the last of, and if Russel’s half-inched them, he’s going to – to – well, he’ll probably tell him to keep up the good work.

The door bursts, and 2D screeches like a banshee. The zombie groans at him. Throwing the nearest thing to hand – a can of sweetcorn of all fucking things! – does absolutely nothing to it, and 2D takes off running, screaming for Murdoc as he tears through the halls.

He encounters the bassist in one of the main hallways, paused as if in the middle of showing off something.

‘Murdoc!’ he screams, and keeps running, even after he’s passed him.

‘What?’ Murdoc yells after him.

‘Zombie!’ he yells, and tumbles through the door at the other end.

Murdoc looks at the open door with its rattling glass pane 2D just vanished through, and then at the other, the one he came in from. A zombie appears a few moments later, lumbering and groaning.

He looks at the interview crew. They look at him.

‘Wait a fucking minute!’ Murdoc yells and runs after 2D, the team in hot pursuit.

They crash into each other in one of the reception rooms, something Murdoc suspects was a staff lounge, back during the days of the lab tests, that they’ve now turned into a games room, and almost end up in a dogpile on one of the couches. Straightening themselves out, Murdoc catches his breath and 2D tries not to whimper.

‘Right,’ Murdoc says with a heavy breath. ‘Right. Okay.’

He nods to himself and goes to the far side, where a cricket bat is propped up. He’s hammered a few nails into it. 2D hates the bloody thing, but it does the job.

‘What are the rules of cricket?’ Murdoc asks.

2D, still somewhere between panic and terror, manages to grin. ‘Fucked if I know,’ he says.

Murdoc grins at him, swings the bat up onto his shoulder, tells them not to wait up, and saunters off down the corridor. There is a loud yell, and some groaning, and dull, wet thumps. A loud crash, a broken _something_ , and then a yell of, ‘all clear!’

2D is the first to poke his head out of the door, looking at Murdoc, splattered with blood, but triumphant, making his way back towards them, zombie beaten to a pulp.

‘Is it dead?’ he asks. ‘Double-dead, I mean?’

Murdoc glances over his shoulder, lets the bat swing at his side.

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘it ain’t getting up any time soon. I’ll dump it on the pile in a minute.’

He looks at 2D then, a lingering, soft look that the interviewers are sure to capture, when really Murdoc is making sure 2D doesn’t have any open wounds.

‘You’re alright?’ 2D asks, doing the same.

Murdoc tilts his head, lets 2D look at his neck.

‘Clean,’ he says, ‘you?’

‘Clean.’

The interviewers, however taken with quiet interaction, are still shaken up.

‘Zombies?’ they ask.

‘Place is infested,’ Murdoc says with a shrug, and they follow him through to the kitchen, where he dumps the bat in the sink, and goes to investigate the door. ‘Two thousand Hell’s Angels burnt up here, and there was some weird experimental shit. You think those gorillas in _Clint Eastwood_ were fake? Get out of it.’

He waves a hand dismissively, as though swatting a fly.

 2D peers around the corner of the pantry, just in shot of the camera.

‘Is it buggered?’ he asks, and Murdoc prods it with his foot.

‘We need better boards, that’s for fucking sure,’ he replies. He looks like a dodgy surveyor, about to fleece an expecting couple for unnecessary work. This level of sleaze, the interviewers have learned, is Murdoc’s general expression, and something of a defence. Better to be a sleaze than a doormat. ‘I think I can patch it up for now, though. Maybe we can get a steel one. Brick it up and seal it off properly. Hermetic, like.’

‘Hermetic?’

‘Medical jargon,’ Murdoc replies with a wave of his hand. 2D blinks at him.

The interviewers are astounded that Murdoc, a man who freely admits to having more mug shots than he does educational certificates, knows a word like _hermetic_.

(They are not as surprised as they would otherwise have been when he returns from Mexico with a medical license under his belt. Literally, it’s just tucked there, in his belt, like he’d forgotten about it.)

(He’d forgotten about it.)

Murdoc heads back down the corridor to see what he could do about the bloodstains on the new carpet – “New, mind, brand new, I only got it down two days ago, and look at it. It’s ruined is what it is.” – and leaves the team to 2D who blushes and stutters and talks about football and his keyboard and takes them to Russel, where the drummer is making a start on dinner, having been huffing and puffing to himself for some time about the bloody bat in the sink.

‘He always leaves them in the sink,’ Russel explains, when they see the bat on the table, on last week’s paper, draining and clean of blood. ‘It’s the safest place to put them, though I have to work up a sweat to get the thing bleached right. The headaches that man gives me!’

The interviewers suspect that Russell is not referring to the headaches he’s gotten from having to bleach zombie blood from the sink. It’s quite a nice sink, so it’s a shame it has to be bleached so thoroughly. It’s starting to strip the colour, a fact Russel bemoans.

‘Murdoc will replace it in a few weeks,’ he explains, as he turns his attention to chopping some peppers. ‘He hates seeing things half-bad when he can replace them. He’s so flippant with the money we’ve got, replacing everything at a whim. Guess it’s because he had to put paper in his shoes as a kid.’

Murdoc doesn’t even deny this nugget of information, because it’s true. He had a rough childhood, and he lets everyone know it. He does what he can to normalise the existence of troubled childhoods, so there’s a visibility on it. _Stop the kids suffering the same shit as me_ , he’d say, if asked. But no one asks, because no one dares.

As Russel continues to feed the interviewers titbits of information in between explanations of his recipe, Noodle, in full hazmat suit, comes trotting into the kitchen, and scoops up the bat and paper, and trots out with it again. Russel and 2D don’t acknowledge her, apparently used to this behaviour, and the camera lingers on the door where the girl had just vanished for several moments before panning back across 2D’s blank expression and back to Russel, happily chattering about the juice properties of the chicken from Tesco versus the chicken from Waitrose.

According to Russel, the chicken from Waitrose is shit.

The interviewers, living on Pot Noodles as they are, are not in a position to argue.

‘I hate British supermarkets,’ Russel says, offhand.

2D lifts his head off the table.

‘You said they was the same as in America,’ he refutes, and it’s intelligent, almost.

‘Well,’ Russel starts, ‘yes. In theory. I’ll take you to America one day, Dee. You’ll see.’

2D does not look enthused; he gets migraines just going to the corner shop, never mind joining the weekly shop. He sits in the car more than he joins in on the misadventures of finding the right tin of beans or stopping Murdoc wandering off with a small child in hand.

It happens, Russel tells them later, more frequently than any of them would like to admit, and it isn’t even a scoring thing anymore. Murdoc just genuinely forgets that Noodle is holding his hand and wanders off without really knowing where he’s wandering off to. Thankfully, his wanderings have not led him into that stall in the bathroom with Russel’s fist giving his mouth some truly lusty and intimate kisses.

Yet, anyway, but with Murdoc there is a first time for everything.

Eventually, Noodle returns, sans hazmat suit, to the kitchen, and climbs into 2D’s lap. He wriggles in the chair to get comfortable, and she throws up a colouring book and some pens onto the table and sets about engaging him in colouring. It’s fascinating to watch. Murdoc enters a few minutes later, looking like he’s scrubbed himself raw, and wearing (questionably) clean clothes. He’s got some planks under his arm, and a nailgun in the other hand.

‘I checked the other doors,’ he says, dumping all but one of the planks on the table.

Noodle tuts at him when the jolt makes her go outside the lines; she, the interviewers note, is remarkably better at this than 2D, who’s colouring looks like a child vomited Play-Doh on the page.

‘Oh hush,’ he says, just the way a parent not acknowledging their child does, ‘anyway, the other doors are fine. I put a little extra on them, though. I’ll patch this one up and get to replacing it in the morning.’

Dinner is done by the time Murdoc’s finished nailing the planks to the door, and they’re all perfectly level and looking like they’re meant to be there, like some pretty little wall art.

As Murdoc pokes at his dinner with a fork, the interviewers having been offered plates each, and seats at the table, even though there isn’t really room for them, he muses aloud at how good it looks.

‘Maybe after I got the steel door in I can put the planks back up,’ he says, ‘disguise it, like, make it part of the room. Maybe turn it into a hanging rack for pans and shit, or put cork on it and turn it into a pinboard. Chalkboard paint, maybe? Make it a noteboard? What do you think?’

Noodle doesn’t have the language to respond to these queries, and 2D doesn’t care. Russel chews on a mouthful of chicken and sunblush tomato and considers it.

‘More hanging space would be good,’ he says, ‘so long as we got it all secure.’

‘Don’t you trust me? Murdoc asks, and looks so sincerely hurt by the implication that the interviewers almost tear up.

They leave not long later, and in the car on the way back to their London hotel, they chatter about what they saw.

Most of the footage doesn’t make it to air at Murdoc’s request. It doesn’t fit to their aesthetic. It makes its way to the internet anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of a comeback, hey?  
> Tesco and Waitrose are two of our supermarkets, Tesco being one of the basic ones, and Waitrose being the fancy bastard ones with overpriced food.  
> I love zombies a lot.  
> Pot Noodles are fucking hideous and haven’t changed after several years of not eating them. I ate one for the first time the other day, and I would rather die than eat another one. But I’ll eat another one I'm sure.  
> It’s been almost a solid year since I started this one, and I don’t remember where the Hell’s Angels comment came from, but I 100% believe it’s in RotO.  
> Hope you enjoyed, lovelies!


	30. All My LIfe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2D is used to the name-calling, but that doesn’t mean it stops hurting at all. [Phase 1]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angst, 2D uses ableist language including the r-slur twice, reluctant talk of ableism and mentions of implied racism, homophobia and people generally being bloody horrible.

Russel tries what he can to avoid dealing with emotional baggage. This isn’t to say he doesn’t care – the opposite, in fact! He loves 2D like a brother, would happily murder anyone who hurt him, but he also –

He has his own shit to deal with, shit he’s never really dealt with, and continues to linger and mould and poison and he’s not about to take on someone else’s baggage as well as his own, not when he’s got Del very literally in the back of his head and wakes in a cold sweat at night, feeling like the gathered salt on his skin is the splash of blood from the drive-by, his sweaty palms wet with Del’s blood where he’s grabbed at his main man, at his soulmate, at his best friend, at his _everything_ and tried to do whatever he could to keep him alive.

Not that it made a difference, and not that it would, not with that many bullets in his everywhere. But he tried, so that counts for something in some twisted logic on another side of the world.

Fuck sake.

So he tries his best not to deal with anybody else’s shit, because he isn’t in a fit state to give advice.

Even so, when he gets up in the middle of the night with sweaty palms and itchy throat and banging heart and head, he doesn’t expect to find a teary-eyed, frog-voiced 2D sitting in the kitchen.

‘The fuck, man?’ Russel asks, because it’s all he can think to say.

2D opens his mouth, but can only manage a shaky breath, a murmur of ‘Russ, I,’ and then he falls silent, face falling into his sticky hands.

Russel nods, and takes a deep breath, rounds the kitchen table to get to the kettle.

‘You want tea?’ he asks, ‘I think we still got some peppermint left.’

2D sniffles. ‘We got any honey?’ he croaks, and Russel checks.

‘Yeah, yeah we got honey. You sure you want that, though?’

It’s not often Russel questions 2D’s decisions; as much of a flighty, indecisive shit as 2D can be, Russel is also not naïve enough to think that the repeated trauma to the poor sod’s head isn’t to blame for said indecisiveness, and honey is not normally the tea 2D drinks when he’s upset like this. He doesn’t normally drink peppermint, either, but peppermint is his favourite, and Russel doesn’t know what else to do.

‘Yeah,’ 2D says. ‘Yeah, I want honey. It’s. Homey. Ha.’

The laugh is bitter, and then he sniffles some more.

As Russel goes about putting the kettle on and getting the big, chipped mug that 2D loves and will protect with his life, they fall into silence, and then 2D opens his mouth again.

‘Am I stupid?’ he asks. ‘I mean. I know I'm stupid. But I'm not. I’m not thick, am I?’

‘Is this about Murdoc?’

‘No,’ 2D assures him. ‘No. He’s been. Better. About the names. But there was a. Paper. They called me – they said I was – I don’t – it was mean.’

Russel doesn’t know the paper he means, and asks. 2D pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, and Russel scans it.

‘Scumbags,’ he says, when he’s done, and puts it to one side to put water in the mug and put a tea bag in there to diffuse. ‘They’re just scumbags, Dee, don’t pay them any mind.’

2D considers this for a moment; Russel suspects this is something he’s been told for many years, and it never really helps. But again, emotional support, right now, it isn’t really Russel’s forte. He tries, but he’s not the best.

‘There’s been. More people have been saying it, yanno?’ 2D says, and plays with his fingers, a little helplessly.

He’s trying to spit the words out, Russel can tell, but he can’t bring himself to, and Russ wonders what, exactly, the words are.

‘What they been saying, Dee?’

2D heaves a sigh. ‘They been at me in the streets, yeah? All, in my grill, and telling me I'm – I'm – they been calling me a retard, right? A retard and a – and all that shit, and I ain’t. I – even Muds don’t call me that.’

Russel will give him that; Murdoc calls him many things, but over the months, his language has been slowly adjusting, becoming softer, and the insults have become something personal, something that 2D knows Murdoc means in the nicest possible way, the way you bully your siblings and your loved ones for saying something so truly silly that you cannot believe they said it, but you can, because they always say things so monumentally _daft_.

 ‘Oh,’ Russel says, because he can’t think of what to say.

If that’s the only thing 2D can muster the courage to say, Russel dreads to think of the other things they’ve been saying about him. They’re all used to getting name calling in the papers and on forums and in letters addressed personally to them by so-called health experts who are seriously concerned about their weight. _Fuck off_ , Helen Jones; you look like a shrivelled avocado.

‘Oh,’ Russel says again, and takes the teabag out and puts the mug in front of 2D, who wraps his hands around it. ‘Right. Um. Shit, man, I don’t know what to say. But you’re aren’t all that.’

‘But what if I _am_?’ 2D asks. ‘I ain’t that smart, am I? I mean, I don’t have good grades.’

‘That doesn’t mean you aren’t smart. You know they say Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic.’

‘They think I’m autistic.’

‘And? If you are, you are. You’re still you, Dee, nothing’ll change that, and it don’t make you no less a brilliant singer and fantastic musician and great man for it.’

2D sits quietly as he takes this in, and sips his tea.

Eventually, he says, ‘why do they say mean things, though, Russ? What did I ever do to them?’

‘Nothing, Dee, nothing. They’re angry people, is all. They’re angry and miserable and jealous of things we have that they want. They’ll be seeing musicians as not having a real job, yeah? “Oh, musicians, it’s all autotune and done in post-production. Everything’s done for them, they don’t have to do a lot. Just sing for three minutes and go home. What an easy life.” But that’s not it at all, is it? You know how much work you put in. You know how hard you work to make content people love. And people are ungrateful bastards who never know what they’ve got until it’s gone.’

2D looks at him then, sadly, like a lost puppy. Russel feels as sad as that look.

‘When I was young,’ he says, ‘I hurt a lot of people. They called me names too. They’ve been calling me names my whole life. And I got used to it, yanno? You just sort of, it becomes a part of life, and it hurts like hell, but you just get on with it. It’s not your business to educate the fuckers. You just get on with your life in spite.’

2D has a look on his face like he’s never really considered Russel as anything more than his friend and drummer bandmate and Only Sane Adult in his immediate vicinity. Russel does not feel like explaining racism and homophobia and all the God-fearing religious hysteria that had surrounded his childhood and adulthood with Del. It was only after they lost it all that they got upset, got in touch, begged for him to come back. Russel has been declining all their calls. He doesn’t need those people in his life now.

He’s got a better life here, for what it’s worth.

Murdoc and 2D, for all their nonsense, are genuine lads, real, genuine people who are honest to a fault. Murdoc is a lying, cheating wanker, but at least he’s honest about it. And he’s a good man, deep down. He’s just as bitter and hurt as they are, in his own way.

‘Oh,’ 2D says.

He drinks some more tea. Russel gets himself a glass of juice from the fridge, sits the other side of the table at last, lets the silence settle warm between them. It’s never a cool silence with 2D, he’s found. It’s always warm, comfortable. Nice, in its own little way.

‘People are calling you ableist shit, right? They will. They call Murdoc and I racist shit all the time. I get fat comments all the time.’

‘You’re not fat,’ 2D starts, but Russel laughs.

‘Dee, I’m fat, it’s cool. I’m a big man, always have been, always will be. It’s fine, it’s water off my back, yanno? You can let it sink you, or you can use it to swim.’

‘I don’t know how to swim.’

Russel almost sighs, but 2D doesn’t do the metaphor thing well, he’s found. There’s time to teach him, and he’ll teach him.

‘Then I’ll teach you,’ he says, ‘we’ll learn together, it’ll be fine, Dee.’

2D drains the last of his tea.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and wipes his nose.

Russel laughs. ‘What for?’

‘For being, I dunno. Stupid, I guess. I don’t mean to be.’

‘You aren’t being stupid, Dee. You’re young and naïve and you’ve been hit in the head enough that your brains are all scrambled, and that’s _okay_. You’re a cool guy, and anyone who says otherwise is outright _wrong_ , yeah?’

It’s hard to find nice words for him. Russel gets it, he does. It’s horrible, being called names by complete strangers who know one or two things about you and make a judgement on that without having a clue about the reality of it. But 2D is safe, all things considered. Murdoc can and will take on anyone who has a bad word to say about the singer, and Russel will happily hold anyone down for him to beat the shit out of.

But there’s just too much white noise in his head, too much of his own grief to work through, and it’s not his place to comfort him from other people’s shittiness. But 2D tries, as much as he can with the limited understanding his white suburban childhood has afforded him. He tries, and Russel appreciates it, even if sometimes 2D makes it worse by opening his mouth, but that’s just what 2D does, and Russ wouldn’t have him any other way, not really.

 ‘You’ll be alright, Dee.’

‘Yeah, yeah, thanks man. You too, though, hey. You’ll be okay?’

It’s a question, and Russel doesn’t know how people call 2D thick, he’s one of the deepest and most thoughtful people he’s ever met. Sort of. It comes and goes.

‘Yeah, Dee. I’ll be okay.’

They’re quiet for a couple more minutes.

‘What are you doing up, anyway?’ 2D asks.

Russel shrugs. ‘Couldn’t sleep. Happens sometimes. I’ll catch up on sleep in a couple days.’

‘Go back to bed,’ 2D says, with the same level of conviction Noodle does. His nose is still red, his eyes still watery, and he probably has some more crying to do, but he won’t let Russel lose out on sleep for it. ‘We got a busy day tomorrow.’

They do; they have an interview first thing, and Murdoc’s already been a shit about it.

‘You need the sleep more than me,’ Russel argues, ‘they’ll ask you questions.’

‘Naw, they won’t ask me,’ 2D says, bitter. ‘I’m special.’

The venom in it makes Russ raise an eyebrow, but he doesn’t prod. They’ve had the discussion, they’ve had the talk now, it’s up to 2D to work through the rest. Russ will probably find all the names 2D’s been called over the months written in a stall in the bathroom, but for now, he’s got to just, work it out verbally. And that’s fine, he can do it.

‘Course you are,’ Russel says, because he doesn’t know what else to suggest. ‘You’re the only you in the whole world, only frontman of _Gorillaz,_ only singer of this band, yeah? Course that’s special. Why wouldn’t they want to speak to someone that special?’

2D does not look happy that the insult has been twisted. He purses his lips, and Russel gets to his feet with a groan.

‘Go back to bed, Dee,’ he says, ‘seriously. Murdoc’ll shout enough if you’re up late, never mind if you’re tired on top of it. We don’t need an hour of him hollering in the car, Noodle’ll cause an accident when she kicks him in the head again.’

2D laughs at that; he shouldn’t, not really, but Murdoc deserved the kick to the back of the head. It’s just lucky that he wasn’t driving at the time.

‘He deserved it.’

‘He always deserves it,’ Russ snorts. ‘Come on, man, go to bed.’

2D looks at his mug for a moment, his reserve wavering, and then he gets up to put his mug in the sink and follow Russel out of the kitchen, and the drummer waits until he sees 2D’s bedroom door shut at the bottom of the stairs before retreating to his own room. He’ll be alright, he thinks. They all will be.

Eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Saturnz Barz.  
> \- According to a demographic I looked at, Crawley is 80% English-born, but I couldn’t find a race demographic that was active (thanks gov website) so I’m going with a mostly-white suburbia for 2D’s childhood. There were probably a fair number of not-white kids in school, but his street were all white dentists I bet.  
> \- People are gross, yo. There are a lot of things I want to say and a lot of things I could have talked about, but I’m not qualified for any of them, so naturally I skimmed over a lot of things. I imagine in the early days, as good friends and as close as they’d become by the time the debut was out, I guess there’d still be some hesitance to really talk about their shitty times, yanno? It’s hard to put horrible things into words sometimes, even more so when you had a car crashed into your face and watched a loved one die in front of you. Shit’s rough and everybody hurts.  
> \- I am so hype for this new album tho, guys, I’m so hype.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


	31. I've Seen Their Worlds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, there is too much happening in too little space with too few minutes, and sometimes, sometimes, Murdoc just can’t do it. [Phase 2]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> murdoc throws up twice, angst

Noodle doesn’t remember, really, really remember, the last time she saw Murdoc cry. She’s not even sure she’s really seen him cry at all. Maybe a tear or two when he’s stubbed his toe super hard and he bit his tongue trying not to swear and that’s just a biological reaction, that happens. She broke her finger once, and didn’t cry, but then banged her knee on the counter and cried for like an hour. Sometimes it’s the stuff that doesn’t really hurt that hurts the most and sometimes you just gotta cry it out, so she doesn’t really count it as crying.

So she’s not even sure she’s seen Murdoc cry, and if she did, she doesn’t remember it. Which is why she thinks she hasn’t, because she’d have remembered seeing it if she had, surely. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, when you see the main man himself shed a tear or three because Bambi’s mum died, or he’s feeling existential terror over a deal he may or may not have made.

Oh, hush up, Noodle, you’re talking yourself in circles.

Well, anyway, she hasn’t seen Murdoc crying, but she’s seen him get up on the wrong side of the bed plenty. He’s always that little bit on edge, and that’s fine, sometimes, he’s on edge. She’s learnt, over the years, to deal with it. He’s a very private man, as much as he wanders around topless and tells everybody every single thing that happens to him. He’s private, keeps it all bottled inside. She guesses that’s a product of his upbringing, of his having to keep his trap shut lest his brother start stubbing out cigarettes on his nancy-boy ass or some other violence. Murdoc’s quiet when she meets him in the car; they’ve got to update her wardrobe again, she’s had a growth spurt, and Russel is down with the flu and 2D can’t drive, so it’s up to ole Uncle Murdoc (Dad, Noodle will admit to herself, he’s the closest to a Dad that she has, and it’s a very different kind of Dad to what Russel is, but her name is technically Niccals so she is technically Family, and God that kicked up such a fuss! She doesn’t think much of it these days, but she remembers all the same, and she lets herself admit such things as familial attachment. It keeps her sane, as much as she wants to dropkick Murdoc’s face into the next century) to help her obtain said wardrobe upgrades.

His knuckles are white on the wheel as he drives them down into London, his jaw constantly working with well-chewed gum. He doesn’t smoke in the car any more, a blazing row about it with her just after they’d reunited, and he’d put a stop to it. He’s good like that. Makes the little attempts.

It counts for something, she supposes.

She watches him as he drives, gives up on making small talk. Murdoc is in his Quiet Mood, which means talking is mostly right out; nightmares, she guesses, or some conversation or another that he’s had in the last few hours that have put him out. He gets like this, and in his more responsible, sensible moments of wise thought and introspection, he might even willingly admit it’s his anxiety, it’s his neurotic inability to process his emotions and present them in a socially acceptable way. Noodle looks at him, and he reminds her that he’s a doctor.

‘I know how brains work,’ he tells her. ‘Brains and chemicals and all the ways it goes tits-up. I know about that, love. I’m not just talking out of my arse.’

Noodle makes a comment about how he’d be a more productive member of society if he did talk out of his arse, and he snorts, and seems to cheer up a little.

But today is not one of his introspective days, so she doesn’t get an explanation for his quietness today, and that’s fine. This is what Murdoc’s like, and she’s used to it. They drive quietly from the estate, and Murdoc runs over a wandering zombie. Noodle cheers, hollers about the points, but Murdoc doesn’t even smile. He could have smiled, if he chose, she thinks, because there are creases around his mouth, but he decided against it. Determined to be miserable then, she guesses.

Weirdo.

They get to London and Murdoc has cheered enough to answer her questions, and ask his own about what she wants.

‘Do you need any tampons or anything?’ he asks, ‘might as well get everything while we’re here, hey?’

Noodle trots around the side of the car and slots her hand into his. He squeezes.

‘No,’ she says, ‘Russ got some with the last grocery shop, so I’m all good, thank you.’

He nods, and they head up from the parking lot and into the shopping centre, and he lets her lead him to the stores she wants to go.

‘I’m just the bank,’ he laughs, and she skips a little to keep pace with him.

It’s been a while, but his legs are still longer than hers. And his pace is faster, his whole body itching with the weight of something he won’t tell her about. She glances up at him in the first store, and he pulls out a T-shirt, some punny slogan across the front, and he offers it to her.

‘Ha-ha,’ she chuckles, but it’s not really a laugh, ‘I like it.’

He nods, a rough jerk of his head, and then he continues down the row of clothes, chewing on his lip. Noodle looks at the T-shirt in her hands, and then trots after him. As she points at something on the top rail, a cool and offensively colourful jacket that she can’t reach, something flashes behind them. Murdoc freezes completely, doesn’t even breathe. Noodle whirls on her heel, making a chalkboard sound as the rubber squeaks on the vinyl, but she sees nobody. She waits, and waits, and waits, but sees nobody. So she turns back to Murdoc, and reminds him that he’s got to get the jacket down, gently, like she’s coaxing a feral animal.

Murdoc is still for a second, and then finishes the action, gets the jacket and passes it to her.

She trots off, once they’ve got a suitable amount of clothes, to try them on, coming out every minute or so to model the fitting and better items she’s found. She’s starting to find her style, to find enjoyment in the wildness of the clothing options presented to her, and she’s eager to show them off to the still black-clad, torn-jean, old rocker look that Murdoc has sported for the years that she’s known him.

He approves of everything, but his eyes are elsewhere. She jams herself back into her clothes, and they head for the tills, his hand gripping hers tight enough to make her knuckles ache.

Another flash, and Murdoc bears his teeth, hunkers down over the keypad for his credit card. Noodle yanks the bag off the counter, and they make their escape as soon as his card’s free of processing. She tosses a ‘thank you’ over her shoulder. Murdoc is holding her wrist.

They duck and dive through the throng of people, into busy stores where they can blend. Noodle needs underwear, but the only decent underwear store that isn’t for the, ah, provocative lass, is fucking _empty_.

Murdoc looks at her like she’s just kicked him in the nuts. She murmurs an apology, squeezes his hand and promises to be as quick as she can but she needs to get her bra refitted. Murdoc tries to make himself very small in the corner while he waits.

One of the girls – woman, really, easily in her late forties with grey hairs coming at her temples – takes Noodle into the fitting room, and leaves him be with a gentle smile. She won’t say nothing, and that’s fine by him. He wants to crawl out of his skin, and Noodle’s is itching to get him home, as fast as possible. She tells the woman to hurry up.

The bell on the door chimes. Then it chimes again. Noodle turns, and the tape measure shifts. The woman tuts, and tugs her back into a straight arms-up position.

Murdoc barks something outside the fitting room, and Noodle forgoes the bra, shoving her jersey and her gillet back on, barrelling out of the fitting room, and hitting a photographer in the fucking face. Serves him right. Murdoc is hollering, and she pauses for a second, debates who to leap on. They’re about to fight, and she has to stop someone.

‘Murdoc!’ she crows, and he glances at her.

He’s grey, eyes wide and wild, and there’s a tear in his lip, chewed straight through. She kicks a photographer in the shin, throws two fingers up so that all photos are unsellable – it’s a good trick he taught her, fuck the paparazzi – and makes her way under his arm, feels the weight of him on her shoulder. He’s exhausted, shivering.

‘Get out of my way,’ she snarls, and the paps stare at her.

They take photos. She wonders if Murdoc is losing his mind, it looks like Murdoc is losing his mind.

‘Out of my way!’ she bellows when nobody moves.

In the end, she kicks a pap in the knee and sends him stumbling, and drags Murdoc through the gap provided and out of the store.

‘C’mon,’ she urges, and Murdoc just stares blankly at her.

He’s processing the words, but his thoughts and actionable abilities are completely separate. He can think fifteen thousand things, but he can’t _do_ anything with it.

 She manages to get him out of that section of the centre, into the food hall, where there is so much bustle and so many people that they disappear in the throng, any dad and his daughter. Murdoc grips the back of her neck, and his nails hurt, but she hooks her finger through his belt loop and lets him direct her through the crowds, skirting around a Greek food stall and ducking under a low hanging sign for pizzeria, and then he abruptly stops, gets half the sound of her name out, and then throws up, right there and then on the floor. It’s not the first time he’s done something like this, and Noodle, a few years ago, when she was little, and didn’t understand such things, she would have cried, and cried, and cried, and tried to hold him. Now she grabs his hand and yanks, dragging him as fast as she can through the hall until they’re out in the (debatably) fresh air of the smoke shelter out the back.

Murdoc stands there heaving for breath, and then throws up again.

Noodle tries on her new coat, with its neon colours and patches and true fashion tragedy. It’s not even a disaster, it’s just a tragedy. She loves it.

(2D will later complement her on such a wonderful choice in jacket, and she’ll flush to her hairline and giggle and hate herself for it.)

For now she’s watching Murdoc as he scrapes his mouth and breathes hard through his nose and tries to get at least some semblance of his usual bravado back.

‘What did you see?’ she asks, because Noodle is older, but she’s not old enough to keep her mouth shut just yet. ‘In your dreams.’

She knows that Murdoc dreams, has heard his screams and his cries, but he doesn’t talk about it. He’s in a Quiet Mood, but it’s gone _way_ past Quiet Mood now, this is something else. This is his anxiety peaking in a way she’s never seen it peak before, and he looks stricken when he turns to her, like he wants, desperately, to tell her, but the words catch on his tongue and he makes a choking noise that sounds like her name.

Without a word she dumps her bags on the floor and hugs him, holds him tight and he buries his face in her neck and sobs. They stand there silently for several minutes, and she rubs his back. She has never seen Murdoc cry before, and she never wants to see it again. But she keeps her mouth shut, because she’s not _that_ naïve, and settles instead for shushing him quietly, letting his cigarette and sweat and vomit smell fill her nose.

When he’s done, when he’s pulling away and sniffling and still grey, but blotched red with sore eyes and bloody lips, she looks at him with concern, stern but genuine.

‘Home?’ she asks.

Murdoc swallows, audible and reactive. He nods.

‘Please,’ he says, ‘I’m – ‘ His breath hitches, like he’s about to start crying again, like he’s panicking. He shuts his eyes, forces himself to breathe. ‘I’m – I need to go back to bed, haha, must have – I must have not slept right! All these late nights, haha, I'm getting too old now, little dove, I’m getting too old.’

She frowns at him, but tries to smile at the joke.

He doesn’t smile back, and she continues to frown, but goes to get the bags and holds his hand as they slip through the food hall as quickly as possible, running down the escalator to get back to the car park. They don’t say a word, but they don’t need to, she knows where they’re going, and he doesn’t seem able to talk much.

Back in the safety of the car, he takes a deep breath, two, three. He lights a cigarette. She doesn’t argue with him.

On the road, about halfway home, he veers off without indicating into a side-road, some dingy little country lane with more potholes than designated path, and pulls over in a passing place. He gets out of the car and stands in the middle of the road and stares at the sky. Noodle lets him, stays in the car, watching him quietly through the open driver’s door, watching as he contemplates whatever he’s contemplating. He doesn’t come back in after a few minutes, so she unbuckles herself and gets out too, goes and stands in the road with him, with her ostentatious coat and his bat belt buckle.

‘What did you dream?’ she asks again, quiet.

‘You were dead,’ he tells her, serious, and his red eye is blazing, a flickering fire lapping at her soul.

She has heard 2D talk of his eye doing that, of it being the gateway to a hell they fear, but she has never seen it. She wonders if it’s her imagination; she blinks, and it is gone. She blinks again, and it is back.

‘I’m not going to die,’ she tells him. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? Gorillaz is forever! You sold your soul for this, we aren’t going anywhere.’

He doesn’t look convinced, and looks at the sky again.

‘Murdoc,’ she says, grabs his hands. He looks at her, and he looks so sad, so scared. She nearly cries herself. ‘Murdoc, listen to me. There is – there are other things, right? Other things I have to do in this life. I have – I have my mission. But I won’t die. I promise. Nothing you do, and nothing anybody else ever does, that will never ever kill me. I promise.’

He nods, but she can tell he’s not believing her, not really. He wants to, desperately, but he doesn’t dare. He’s believed before, and been bitten for it.

‘Besides,’ she says, ‘if anything did happen to me, you’d come for me, wouldn’t you? You’d come find me, if someone took me, if something happened. I’m the best guitarist you’ve ever had, you wouldn’t let me just rot in hell for nothing.’

It’s a bad joke, and he smiles, but it’s grim, and his eyes are red-raw.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no I wouldn’t. I’d damn myself to get you out of hell, Noods, you know I would. You and Dee and Russ, you’re all I’ve got. I wouldn’t lose any of you.’

She squeezes his hands.

‘Then promise me,’ she says, ‘promise me that if anything happens, you’ll come for me.’

He looks at her, and she wonders if she’s making a deal with the devil.

‘I promise,’ he says, and his palms burn hot.

She jerks her hands back, and his eyes burn like coals for a single heartbeat, and then something in the air around him changes, something in his soul seems to change. He’s a little bit more Murdoc then, a little bit more _him_. He cracks his neck and rubs his head, and looks at her like she’s gone entirely out of her head.

‘Well,’ he says, clears his throat. He looks sad. ‘We’d better, uh. We’d better get home, hey? NO doubt 2D will be wondering where we’ve got to, and you’ve got to have that whatever rematch with the spinning tops.’

She’s climbing back into the car and says, ‘Beyblades, Murdoc, they’re called Beyblades.’

‘Hogswash,’ he replies, and drops into his seat.

They don’t talk about his – his – whatever that was, whatever he saw that induced such panic at the sight of paparazzi that he ended up throwing up, they don’t talk about it for the rest of the drive home. Her palms itch, so she rubs them on her jeans. He goes straight to the Winnebago when they get back to Kong, and she seeks out Russ for some reassurance and to warn him of the paparazzi. Then she goes back to the Winnebago and knocks and knocks and knocks and knocks and knocks until Murdoc answers, in a T-shirt and his boxers, looking like hell.

‘I’m tired,’ she says, and Murdoc heaves a sigh.

He steps aside. Noodle kicks off her shoes and climbs into the bed. Murdoc shuts the door and tucks himself in against her side.

‘Nobody ever _asks_ ,’ he grouses as they fidget into a comfortable position. It’s three in the afternoon. ‘No, just help yourself to Murdoc’s bed, yes of course. Just help yourself, it’s not like he sleeps in it or anything.’

Noodle shifts her head to free her hair, rests her hand on his heart, beating steady beneath her palm.

‘Shut up,’ she says.

He shuts up, and soon starts snoring. They sleep like that until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Title from Broken.  
> \- This one completely ran away from me, it was meant to be an introspective into Murdoc’s completely and totally irreversibly damaged psyche but then I guess El Manana repeated too many times.  
> \- The underwear shop they’re in is probably La Senza because Noodle is too objectively too young for Ann Summers and Murdoc has standards. Sort of.  
> \- Many thanks to paigek9 who's been a sweetie today and given me some ideas, a couple of which were vaguely incorporated in this piece, and there will be more to follow.  
> \- Thanks for reading, lovelies~!


End file.
